From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756341AbYHTQjR (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:39:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751940AbYHTQjA (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:39:00 -0400 Received: from e1.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.141]:58980 "EHLO e1.ny.us.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753417AbYHTQi7 (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:38:59 -0400 Subject: Re: [discuss] memrlimit - potential applications that can use From: Dave Hansen To: righiandr@users.sourceforge.net Cc: balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com, Paul Menage , Dave Hansen , Hugh Dickins , Andrew Morton , Marco Sbrighi , Linux Memory Management List , linux kernel mailing list In-Reply-To: References: <48AA73B5.7010302@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1219161525.23641.125.camel@nimitz> <48AAF8C0.1010806@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1219167669.23641.156.camel@nimitz> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:38:54 -0700 Message-Id: <1219250334.8960.30.camel@nimitz> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.22.2 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 15:25 +0200, righi.andrea@gmail.com wrote: > Memory overcommit protection, instead, is a way to *prevent* OOM > conditions (problem 1). I completely disagree. :) Think of all the work Eric Biederman did on pid namespaces. One of his motivations was to keep /proc from being able to pin task structs. That is one great example of a way a process can pin lots of memory without mapping it, and overcommit has no effect on this! Eric had a couple of other good examples, but I think task structs were the biggest. As I said to Balbir, there probably are some large-scale solutions to this: things like beancounters. -- Dave