Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 9 Oct 2000 20:16:49 -0300 (BRST) | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler |
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On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > Jim Gettys writes: > >> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> > > >> One of the biggest bitmaps is the background bitmap. So you have a > >> client that uploads it to X and then goes away. There's nobody to > >> un-count to by the time X decides to switch to another background. > > > > Actually, the big offenders are things other than the background > > bitmap: things like E do absolutely insane things, you would not > > believe (or maybe you would). The background pixmap is generally > > in the worst case typically no worse than 4 megabytes (for those > > people who are crazy enough to put images up as their root window > > on 32 bit deep displays, at 1kX1k resolution). > > Still, it would be nice to recover that 4 MB when the system > doesn't have any memory left. > > X, and any other big friendly processes, could participate in > memory balancing operations. X could be made to clean out a > font cache when the kernel signals that memory is low. When > the situation becomes serious, X could just mmap /dev/zero over > top of the background image. > > Netscape could even be hacked to dump old junk... or if it is > just too leaky, it could exec itself to fix the problem.
Which is all good and well to DELAY the task of the OOM killer for a few more minutes.
But in the end, there will be a point where you REALLY run out of memory and you have no other choice than the OOM killer...
(not that I'm against alternative measures, I just think they're orthagonal to this whole discussion)
regards,
Rik -- "What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!" -- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000
http://www.conectiva.com/ http://www.surriel.com/
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