Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

[Marco Colombo]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Jonathan Morton wrote:

> >The main point is letting malloc fail when the memory cannot be
> >guaranteed.
> 
> If I read various things correctly, malloc() is supposed to fail as you
> would expect if /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory is 0.  This is the case on
> my RH 6.2 box, dunno about yours.  I can write a simple test program which
> simply allocates tons of memory if you like...
> 
> ...and I did.  It filled up my physical and swap memory, and got killed by
> the OOM handler before malloc() failed, even though overcommit_memory was
> set to 0.
> 
> *****BAD!*****

Please search list archives, there are plenty of threads about
overcommitment.

Have a look at the sources, that part is easy to read and you'll
realize that /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory does not really enable
/ disable memory overcommitment: its closer to a sanity check to
disallow absurdly sized requests, IIRC.

.TM.
-- 
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     /      /       /                   Marco Colombo
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