Actually, it's not okay: with an ssh login, attempting to do almost anything results in the oom-killer going psychotic, killing everything, including init!
Code:
Out of Memory: Killed process 1 (init).
oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x1d2
DMA per-cpu:
cpu 0 hot: low 8, high 24, batch 4
cpu 0 cold: low 0, high 8, batch 4
Normal per-cpu: empty
HighMem per-cpu: empty
and then finally dying, as expected:
Code:
Kernel panic - not syncing: Out of memory and no killable processes...
EIP: 0073:[<0804cf2c>] CPU: 0 Not tainted ESP: 007b:bfffebbc EFLAGS: 00010293
Not tainted
EAX: 00000010 EBX: bfffebe0 ECX: 0809b638 EDX: 0809b834
ESI: 0000059b EDI: 0000000c EBP: bfffec68 DS: 007b ES: 007b
Call Trace:
[<80034549>] vprintk+0xe9/0x13c
[<800421ee>] notifier_call_chain+0x1e/0x38
[<80033a9e>] panic+0x56/0xbc
[<8004ea63>] select_bad_process+0x5b/0x80
and so on, but the panic is in select_bad_process. I can see how, after killing init, you have absolutely nothing left. For reference, I had about 200MB of swap free at the time.