Re: Memory management in Kernel 2.4.x

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@zytor.com)
27 May 2002 14:22:22 -0700

Followup to: <1022513156.1126.289.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk>
By author: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On a -ac kernel with mode 2 or 3 set for overcommit you have to run out
> of kernel resources to hang the box. It won't go OOM because it can't.
> That wouldn't be a VM bug but a leak or poor handling of kernel
> allocations somewhere. Sadly the changes needed to do that (beancounter
> patch) were things Linus never accepted for 2.4
>

Well, if you can't fork a new process because that would push you into
overcommit, then you usually can't actually do anything useful on the
machine.

-hpa

-- 
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt	<amsp@zytor.com>
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