SIMPLE_LMK: A Low Memory Killer For Android Systems Being Worked On For Linux Kernel

SIMPLE_LMK is a simple low-memory killer being worked on for potential upstreaming in the mainline Linux kernel in the future but for now is simply seeking comments on its design approach.

SIMPLE_LMK is being worked on by Sultan Alsawaf, a kernel engineer currently employed by the Comma.ai self-driving car startup. This low memory killer is designed for Android and relies upon the priorities assigned to processes within the Android ecosystem for determining what applications should be killed off first -- those with the lowest priority. This implementation is tied into the kernel's page allocator code and begins acting as soon as a page allocation hits out-of-memory and for knowing when a page is freed.

The basic implementation at this point is just a few hundred lines of code and does allow configuring the minimum amount of memory to free per reclaim as well as how often to perform memory reclaims if necessary.

The work in its "RFC" state can be found on the kernel mailing list.