Re: [RFC] Arch option to touch newly allocated pages

Daniel Phillips
2002-03-06T15:05:34Z

On March 5, 2002 07:30 pm, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 01:12:19PM -0500, Jeff Dike wrote:
> > Really? And you're unconcerned about the impact on the rest of the system
> > of a UML grabbing (say) 128M of memory when it starts up? Especially if it
> > may never use it?
>
> Honestly, I think that most people want to know if the system they've setup
> is overcommited at as early a point as possible: a UML failing at startup
> with out of memory is better than random segvs at some later point when the
> system is under load. Refer to the principle of least surprise. And if the
> user truely wants to disable that, well, you can give them a command line
> option to shoot themselves in the foot with.

Suppose you have 512 MB memory and an equal amount of swap. You start 8
umls with 64 MB each. With your and Peter's suggestion, the system always
goes into swap. Whereas if the memory is only allocated on demand it
probably doesn't.

--
Daniel