Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 26 Mar 2000 16:48:30 -0800 (PST) | From | David Whysong <> | Subject | Re: Avoiding OOM on overcommit...? |
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On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Richard Gooch wrote: >Linda Walsh writes: >> David Whysong wrote: >> > If you run out of a resource, the system should not crash. The kernel just >> > has to free up the resource. A convenient way of doing that is to kill a >> > user process. >> >> Then you have violated the integrity of the user-process >> space. Tell me, which processes are killed when the system runs out >> file descriptors? How about processes? Disk space? Why are you >> treating memory differently? > >Because it's different (read harder)? I still haven't seen a >description of how we handle stack exhaustion properly. All we can do >there is kill the offending process.
That's true, but there are other good reasons. Here are two: memory can be implicitly allocated, and the kernel uses memory dynamically.
And actually it isn't all _that_ different. The kernel has to deny a resource to user-space if that resource is used up. Most programs will cease to function if you deny them a resource that they really need. Memory is the most fundamental of resources.
Dave
David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong DSS PGP Key 0x903F5BD6 : FE78 91FE 4508 106F 7C88 1706 B792 6995 903F 5BD6 D-H PGP key 0x5DAB0F91 : BC33 0F36 FCCD E72C 441F 663A 72ED 7FB7 5DAB 0F91
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