Re: 2.2/2.4/2.6 VMs: do malloc() ever return NULL?

William Lee Irwin III
2003-11-26T09:58:40Z

On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 06:31:37PM +1100, Tim Connors wrote:
> Hence 2 should be the default.
> 0 should be left for those poor fools who run closed source software,
> and can't get their vendor to fix their bugs, so need to use some
> kernel kludges (ie, overcommit) to get around it.

This suggestion has two rather large problems:

(a) Non-overcommit is a useful reliability feature: the VM guarantees
(well, with 99% probability) it will not be forced to randomly
kill processes, but instead return -ENOMEM when there isn't
enough memory.

(b) Once overcommit is enabled, it can't be reliably disabled.

-- wli