by someone below the TIF_MEMDIE check, so buddy allocator doesn't see that process is OOM-killed and it can simply fail the allocation :/ Observed in reality on RHEL4(2.6.9)+OpenVZ kernel when a user doing some memory allocation tricks triggered OOM panic. Signed-off-by: Denis Lunev Signed-off-by: Kirill Korotaev Cc: Nick Piggin Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds q@N5‘