On 21 Mar 2000 23:36:59 +0100, Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it> wrote:
>On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
>
>[...[
>> So? If you touch the memory, overcommit doesn't come into play.
>
>All processes should do that for it to work. Example (you have 128MB of swap):
Yes. It is easy to force (just overload malloc(3) with small library wrapper
in /etc/ld.so.preload). Or wrap around brk/sbrk(2).
Problem is, overcommit is just one thing that could lead to OOM.
We can discuss that you can lower the chances for OOM by disabling
overcommit, implementing efficient per-user-VM quota, fixing stack size,
reserving some memory only for kernel and/or root, etc, but it will just
lower the chances for OOM, not eliminate it.
OOM will still happen, and we need some handling when it hits us. killing
random process is at least guaranteed to be fair as far as it goes, but
fairness is not necessarily the most sane thing to do in all cases...
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