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Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 06:58:15 -0300
From: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>
To: Paulo Marques <pmarques@grupopie.com>
Cc: Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Kswapd flaw
Message-ID: <20050628095815.GA13464@logos.cnet>
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On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 03:55:29PM +0100, Paulo Marques wrote:
> Al Boldi wrote:
> >On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:04:08PM +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
> >
> >>In 2.4.31 kswapd starts paging during OOMs even w/o swap enabled.
> >>
> >>Is there a way to fix/disable this behaviour?
> >
> >
> >Marcelo,
> >
> >Kswapd starts evicting processes to fullfil a malloc, when it should just
> >deny it because there is no swap.
> 
> I think what you really want is to adjust your "overcommit" settings.
> 
> See: "Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting"

Al, 

You should set overcommit accordingly as Paulo mentions.

You might also want to disable the OOM killer (CONFIG_OOM_KILLER).