Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

[Jonathan Morton]

>> I'm currently investigating the old non-overcommit patch, which (apart from
>> needing manual applying to recent kernels) appears to be rather broken in a
>> trivial way.  It prevents allocation if total reserved memory is greater
>> than the total unallocated memory.  Let me say that again, a different way
>> - it prevents memory usage from exceeding 50%...
>
>Think fork(2).

fork() is allowed to return a failure value, and it already does so if
there isn't enough memory (at least with the limited tests I've come up
with).  Guess again.

I have, however, found a bug in the non-overcommit patch - it seems to be
capable of double-freeing (and then some) - starting 4 Java VMs and then
closing them causes VMReserved to go negative on my system.

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from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
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