Re: 2.4 kernel series and the oom_killer and /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

[Daniel Phillips <phillips@arcor.de>]

On Saturday 24 August 2002 05:46, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Aug 2002, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > On Thursday 22 August 2002 19:32, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > 3 is a totally paranoid [overcommit policy] that will require everything in
> > > ram can be dumped to swap or paged back from backing store
> >
> > How do you handle the situation where you have a lot of shared memory in a
> > half-paged-out state, so that each shared page consumes both ram and swap?
> 
> That will work fine with 'totally paranoid' mode.  There is always
> enough swap space to hold _all_ pages, so everything will just
> continue to work.

Apparently, maximum available memory is limited to

  physical memory + (swap - physical memory) = just swap

in this case, and if swap is smaller than (the potentially swappable portion
of) physical memory you might as well just turn it off.

-- 
Daniel