silent_mode and LINUX_OOM_ADJ

While reviewing Peter Geoghegan's postmaster death patch, I noticed that 
if you turn on silent_mode, the LINUX_OOM_ADJ code in fork_process() 
runs when postmaster forks itself into background. That re-enables the 
OOM killer in postmaster, if you've disabled it in the startup script by 
adjusting /proc/self/oom_adj. That seems like a bug, albeit a pretty 
minor one.

This may be a dumb question, but what is the purpose of silent_mode? 
Can't you just use nohup?

--   Heikki Linnakangas  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com