Re: [RFC] Enabling other oom schemes

Chris Friesen
2003-09-12T04:31:56Z

Rahul Karnik wrote:
> Rusty Lynch wrote:
>
>> The patch below uses a notifier list for other components to register
>> to be called when an out of memory condition occurs.
>
>
> How does this interact with the overcommit handling? Doesn't strict
> overcommit also not oom, but rather return a memory allocation error?
> Could we not add another overcommit mode where oom conditions cause a
> kernel panic?

If you have real, true strict overcommit, then it can cause you to have
errors much earlier than expected.

Imagine a process that consumes 51% of memory. With strict overcommit,
that process cannot fork() since there is not enough memory.

Chris

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