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OOM-Kill Integration: clarify when kernel headers are Required to be Installed

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
58/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
linux
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the OOM Kill integration documentation page and locate the section that currently says kernel headers must be installed. Verify the BTF check and the distribution-specific requirements against the reported Amazon Linux 2023 behavior, then update the wording and table so the prerequisites are accurate and clear.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Documentation Page

https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/oom-kill/

Issue Description

Within the OOM Kill documentation it is suggested that kernel-headers must be installed - this does not seem to be correct as 1) I have a distribution of Amazon Linux 2023 running ECS which is sending OOM Kills and have not installed kernel-devel and 2) claude states that if BTF is support built-in (which is as simple as checking for the file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux) the kernel headers package is not required.

My own configuration is shown below

[root@ip-10-2-54-189 ~]# dnf list installed kernel-devel
Error: No matching Packages to list
[root@ip-10-2-54-189 ~]# dnf search kernel-headers
Last metadata expiration check: 1 day, 15:39:49 ago on Sat Jun 13 00:43:35 2026.
==================================================================================== Name Exactly Matched: kernel-headers ====================================================================================
kernel-headers.aarch64 : Header files for the Linux kernel for use by glibc

Suggestion

I would modify the section on installing kernel headers similar to the below:

In order to operate properly, the OOM Kill integration requires either that your kernel ships with BTF built in (shown in the table below, or confirmed by running ls /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux) or that kernel headers are installed using the command shown in the Kernel Headers Install Command column.

┌───────────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────┐
│   Distribution    │ BTF Built-in │    Kernel Headers Install Command     │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Amazon Linux 2    │ No           │ yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r)  │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Amazon Linux 2023 │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Debian 10         │ No           │ apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Debian 11+        │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ RHEL/CentOS 7/8   │ No           │ yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r)  │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ RHEL/CentOS 9+    │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Ubuntu 18.04      │ No           │ apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Ubuntu 20.04+     │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
└───────────────────┴──────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────┘
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