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SubjectRe: vfork: out of memory, when there's plenty of swap free
On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>
>
>On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>
>> >It might certainly be an option to allocate inodes in bigger chunks at a
>> >time. That would at least make the problem become less.
>>
>> It would make the problem to go away completly according to me.
>
>For inodes, yes.
>
>For other things, no.

Ah yes of course, I was talking only about inodes, I had not ever thought
about other pieces of code. Excuse me if it wasn't clear from my previous
email.

>And it makes allocating inode pages a riskier thing - although for inodes
>we almost always do have the option of just trying to free up something
>else, so there a "soft" allocator may well be completely acceptable.

Agreed.

>just too likely to fail. Going to 2 or 4 is probably fine (just 2 pages
>is enough to guarantee that there is no 2-page fragmentation, which is all
>that forking cares about, and is safer if you worry about making sure you
>can sometimes get new inodes).

Hmm, yes agreed. The main issue is to get 2 contiguous pages.

>Want to try it and see? It should be trivial to change the inode code to
>allocate 2 or four pages at a time (two constants need to change).

Ok sure! ;) I'll try that very soon and I'll let you know.

Andrea Arcangeli


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