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
DSS PGP Key 0x903F5BD6 : FE78 91FE 4508 106F 7C88 1706 B792 6995 903F 5BD6
D-H PGP key 0x5DAB0F91 : BC33 0F36 FCCD E72C 441F 663A 72ED 7FB7 5DAB 0F91
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 31 2000 - 21:00:16 EST