Re: [PATCH] Prevent OOM from killing init

Jonathan Morton
2001-03-25T18:36:59Z

>> My patch already fixes OOM problems caused by overgrown caches/buffers, by
>> making sure OOM is not triggered until these buffers have been cannibalised
>> down to freepages.high. If balancing problems still exist, then they
>> should be retuned with my patch (or something very like it) in hand, to
>> separate one problem from the other. AFAIK, balancing should now be a
>> performance issue rather than a stability issue.
>
>Great. I haven't seen your patch yet as my gateway ate it's very last
>disk. I look forward to reading it.

I'm currently investigating the old non-overcommit patch, which (apart from
needing manual applying to recent kernels) appears to be rather broken in a
trivial way. It prevents allocation if total reserved memory is greater
than the total unallocated memory. Let me say that again, a different way
- it prevents memory usage from exceeding 50%...

Is there a fast way of getting total VM size? Eg. equivalent to the
following code:

si_meminfo(&i);
si_swapinfo(&i);
free = i.totalram + i.totalswap;

If not, I have to do some jiggery to keep good performance along with true
non-overcommittance.

--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: chromi@cyberspace.org (not for attachments)
big-mail: chromatix@penguinpowered.com
uni-mail: j.d.morton@lancaster.ac.uk

The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.

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