Re: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1

pacman (pacman-kernel@DEFIANT.cqc.com)
Wed, 7 Oct 1998 00:12:33 -0500 (EST)

Mike Harrelson writes the following:
>
>According to a Sun engineer, Solaris 2.6 does not support memory overcommit.
>Normally Solaris manages memory by reserving virtual memory for all processes,
>whether they use utilize it or not. When virtual memory has been fully
>reserved, then malloc()'s, fork()'s, etc may then fail with the 'Resource
>temporaily unvailable', even though the physical swap may be hardly touched.

And I suppose Sun is constantly flooded with complaints along these lines:

"Hey! I allocated all the memory in my system, and your crappy OS said I
couldn't allocate any more! How dare you put reliability ahead of hackish
optimizations! I demand lazy, unsafe vm that can cause any process to die
randomly at any time even though it has done nothing wrong!"

I don't say this often, but perhaps we should take a lesson from Solaris
here.

-- 
Alan Curry


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