Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init | From | James Antill <> | Date | 26 Mar 2001 14:04:04 -0500 |
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Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br> writes:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Guest section DW wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 10:52:09PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > > > You can do overcommit avoidance in Linux if you are bored enough to try it. > > > > Would you accept it as the default? Would Linus? > > It wouldn't help. Suppose you run without overcommit and you > fill up RAM and swap to the last page. > > Then you change the size of one of the windows on your desktop > and a program gets sent -SIGWINCH.
Ignoring the fact that most people don't use a tty based desktop, and that I'm pretty happy having my desktop die in flames when OOM (my DNS or smtp server on the other hand...).
> In order to process this > signal, the program needs to allocate some variables on its > stack, possibly needing a new page to be allocated for its > stack ...
man sigaltstack
> ... and since this is something which could happen to any program > on the system, the result of non-overcommit would be getting a > random process killed (though not completely random, syslogd and > klogd would get killed more often than the others).
I fail to see why, stack usage can be limited (and possibly cleanly handled by having a prctl() to say make sure X pages are available on the stack).
If you want overcommit great, and I think it's a valid default ... but it'd be nice if I could say I don't want it for apps that aren't written using glib etc.
-- # James Antill -- james@and.org :0: * ^From: .*james@and\.org /dev/null - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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