Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 07 Nov 1998 09:50:55 +0100 | From | Brian Schau <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Patch to Memory Subsystem ... (Needed?) |
| |
Greg Mildenhall wrote: > > On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Brian Schau wrote: > > Hard to say. But with ram being cheap these days, who can't afford a > > spare 1Mb? > A bit of extra swap space is a whole lot cheaper, and renders you less > likely to have to kill the process. And you can add in swap without > powering the machine down. > > -Greg Mildenhall
But that was exactly the problem. I ran out of physical and swap memory, so root couldn't get a login to fix things. I can add yet another 128Mb swapfile and be happy about that UNTIL this swapfile is exhausted too. Then I will be in deep sh*t again ......
To clear things up:
1) If you reserve memory using 'rootpages' you reserve a part of the TOTAL memory available. NOT only from the PHYSICAL memory available. So, if you have 512Mb physical mem and 512Mb swap mem, you reserve some pages from 1Gig available memory - the pages might be swapped out, they might be swapped in ... But only root can use them, making root able to clean up things if the memory pool available to ordinary users seems exhausted.
2) The amount written to 'rootpages' is currently the number of pages to reserve. Let's keep it that way - the conversion from Mb/Kb is better left to a non-kernel program (can easily be done in a shell-script ;o)
3) I sense that people doesn't quite 'like' the patch (idea). That's fine with me. All I asked for was for somebody to spend 5 minutes on validating the changes so that I could safely use the patch for private purpose ....
Kind regards,
Brian
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |