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SubjectRe: Avoiding OOM on overcommit...?
On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Jesse Pollard wrote:
>On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, James Sutherland wrote:

[On the definition of overcommit]

>>That's a totally different meaning of the word, not the one everyone
>>else here is using - and if a simple failed userspace memory
>>allocation causes your system to crash, get a refund. It's terminally
>>broken.
>
>Don't change topics. that is what overcommit in this case is. It can
>crash systems BECAUSE THE SYSTEM WAS TOLD TO ALLOCATE MORE MEMORY THAN WAS
>AVAILABLE.

No! Look, you've been told this probably a half dozen times. If the system
crashes it's due to a bug in handling OOM situaions, which has NOTHING to
do with overcommit.

>User mode problems can allways cause the system to crash, if resources are
>overcommited (memory in particular) - either directly due to the system going
>into a deadlock hang, or directly, by having init fail.

No, that's NOT TRUE.

If you run out of a resource, the system should not crash. The kernel just
has to free up the resource. A convenient way of doing that is to kill a
user process.

This is COMPLETELY independent of overcommit. You have to deal with
resource starvation the same way in a non-overcommitted system as well.


Dave

David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu
Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara
My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong
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