"VM watchdog"? [was Re: VM nuisance]
Quoted 11 lines · David
Quoted 8 lines
Didn't everyone pretty much agree that if we could turn off overcommit
completely and reliably, that would be the preferred solution ? Simply sig11
the app that's unlucky enough to want more memory than there's in the system (or, horror, havemalloc()fail)Now, I don't remember the entire thread, but IIRC it was difficult to kill overcommit completely.
The kernel allocates memory within itself. We will still reach OOM conditions. It can't be avoided.
That doesn't sound good.
What bugs me about this statement was that until 2.4, I never had lockups. I sometimes had a LOT of swapping and slow response, but I also knew that running a complex numeric simulation when RAM < 'program needs' does that. I accepted it and tended to arrange such runs in my absence. Now I find that I get some process nuked (or worse - partially nuked) even after increasing to 4x swap and eliminating lazy habits that would leave some idle process up for a few days in case I needed it again (worked fine in 2.0.36). There are _alot_ of good things in 2.4, but sometimes....
Does your statement imply that a machine left "alone" must eventually OOM given enough runtime?? It seems that it must.
Signature · 1 line
2.4 VM: "I'm sorry Dave ... I'm afraid I can't do that."