Re: Avoiding OOM on overcommit...?

From: David Whysong (dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 27 2000 - 03:59:32 EST


On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Peter T. Breuer wrote:
>"A month of sundays ago Richard Gooch wrote:"
>> Look, I think it would be nice you you could provably ensure that
>> processes can be made safe from OOM. Some people will like that. But
>> until a lightweight, effective scheme is proposed that can support it,
>> I think we should steer clear of ad-hoc solutions that only give half
>> guarantees. It's better not to claim something at all than claim it
>> and people find out later it's not true.
>
>I believe that physical backing in swap for a processes stack pages is
>such a guarantee.

Not really. The stack dynamically grows. You can still run out of memory
when the stack grows, and then what do you do? Kill the program.

You could limit the stack size, but then you just kill programs earlier.

Dave

David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu
Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara
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