On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 16:13 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 15:59:33 -0700 Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > - Shouldn't there be a way to alter this namespace's shm_ctlmax?
> > 
> > Unfortunately this would also add the complexity I previously mentioned.
> 
> But if the current namespace's shm_ctlmax is too small, you're screwed.
> Have to shut down the namespace all the way back to init_ns and start
> again.
> 
> > > - What happens if we just nuke the limit altogether and fall back to
> > >   the next check, which presumably is the rlimit bounds?
> > 
> > afaik we only have rlimit for msgqueues. But in any case, while I like
> > that simplicity, it's too late. Too many workloads (specially DBs) rely
> > heavily on shmmax. Removing it and relying on something else would thus
> > cause a lot of things to break.
> 
> It would permit larger shm segments - how could that break things?  It
> would make most or all of these issues go away?
> 

So sysadmins wouldn't be very happy, per man shmget(2):

EINVAL A new segment was to be created and size < SHMMIN or size >
SHMMAX, or no new segment was to be created, a segment with given key
existed, but size is greater than the size of that segment.

Thanks,
Davidlohr