OOM tries to kill a root process eating all the memory but does n

[Cabaniols, Sebastien]

Hello,

I have a process  which eats all the memory available 
(buy making a loop of mallocs, writing and reading the 
malloc'd memory) called memoryEater (to torture test
the memory system before going to a production system)

My kernel is 2.4.2smp on a 4 way Alpha machine with 8 Go
of  RAM.

When the process is launched under a user ID everything
works the way it should, i.e. the malloc works fine until 
the process eats 7.8 Gbytes of RAM and then the process
stops on a segfault.

When the process is launched under the root ID, I see
the OOM in the /var/log/messages saying it wants to kill
this process (memoryEater) but it does not kill it.

Hitting Control+C, kill PID -9 does not work. Halting the machine 
is my only solution.

Any ideas ?

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