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SubjectRe: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1
Hi,

On Sun, 04 Oct 1998 23:49:53 -0400, Feuer <feuer@his.com> said:

> I had five ideas

> 1) if a process writes to memory when the memory isn't really there,
> the process is stopped by the scheduler, and cannot run again until
> it can get its memory.  Could be some security problems and/or
> deadlocks here.

That already happens. It's not the scheduler's job: the
get_free_page() functions which the kernel use to allocate memory
automatically wait for that memory to become available.

> 2) when reach OOM, make a new swap file.  Other OS's use growable
> swap, why not linux?

Can be done, but swap files are generally much less efficient that
partitions and you're just shifting the problem to another exhaustible
resource anyway (in other words it's still not a complete solution).

> 3) Someone mentioned the problem when A must be swapped out, and B
> must be swapped in, but there is no swap around for A to be swapped
> to.  To solve this, I would reserve at bootup a small amount (<<1K)
> of memory to use as a buffer.  That way the two can be interchanged
> through the buffer.

Irrelevant: we can almost always find small bits of memory to
allocate. If we can't, then the whole kernel is hung anyway. Apart
from anything else, we can continue to swap out non-dirty pages even
in this situation.

> 4) Maybe there is a way to more carefully arrange the swap+memory so
> that conflicts are less likely.

Huh?

--Stephen

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