From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 28 May 2002 01:39:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 28 May 2002 01:39:26 -0400 Received: from mout1.freenet.de ([194.97.50.132]:65155 "EHLO mout1.freenet.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 28 May 2002 01:39:26 -0400 From: Andreas Hartmann X-Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel Subject: Re: Memory management in Kernel 2.4.x Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 07:42:11 +0200 Organization: Privat Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Trace: susi.maya.org 1022564531 710 192.168.1.3 (28 May 2002 05:42:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@fu-berlin.de User-Agent: KNode/0.7.1 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Followup to: <1022513156.1126.289.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk> > By author: Alan Cox > In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel >> >> On a -ac kernel with mode 2 or 3 set for overcommit you have to run out >> of kernel resources to hang the box. It won't go OOM because it can't. >> That wouldn't be a VM bug but a leak or poor handling of kernel >> allocations somewhere. Sadly the changes needed to do that (beancounter >> patch) were things Linus never accepted for 2.4 >> > > Well, if you can't fork a new process because that would push you into > overcommit, then you usually can't actually do anything useful on the > machine. >>From my experience with mode 2: you can't do _anything_, if the overcommitment range has been reached. Even running programms are crashing if they want to have some more memory. So, new processes cannot be started and old processes cannot run and are crashing as far as they want to have more memory. At last, there will be only one user-process on the machine running - the bad programm, eating up all the memory. Regards, Andreas Hartmann