* Peter Maydell (peter.mayd...@linaro.org) wrote: > On 9 December 2015 at 10:29, Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dgilb...@redhat.com> > wrote: > > (OK, to be honest I think we should protect every allocation - but I do > > have sympathy with the complexity/testing arguments). > > My view on this is that Linux overcommits, so the actual likely > way that "oops, out of memory" will manifest is by some page not > being able to be allocated-on-demand, at which point your process > is toast anyway. Checking malloc returns is really only checking > your virtual address space allocation, which typically speaking > always succeeds, except in the "we tried to get gigabytes at > once" case...
We already get some failures, e.g. qemu-system-x86_64 -m 8192 fails with an allocation error on my laptop (8GB RAM+2GB swap). I'm also not sure whether your statement is true once things like cgroup/ulimit memory restrictions are used and/or mlock. People really really hate OOM behaviour in production systems and jump through hoops to try and avoid it. Dave > > thanks > -- PMM -- Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilb...@redhat.com / Manchester, UK
