• Andrew Morton's avatar
    [PATCH] strict overcommit · 502bff06
    Andrew Morton authored
    Alan's overcommit patch, brought to 2.5 by Robert Love.
    
    Can't say I've tested its functionality at all, but it doesn't crash,
    it has been in -ac and RH kernels for some time and I haven't observed
    any of its functions on profiles.
    
    "So what is strict VM overcommit?  We introduce new overcommit
     policies that attempt to never succeed an allocation that can not be
     fulfilled by the backing store and consequently never OOM.  This is
     achieved through strict accounting of the committed address space and
     a policy to allow/refuse allocations based on that accounting.
    
     In the strictest of modes, it should be impossible to allocate more
     memory than available and impossible to OOM.  All memory failures
     should be pushed down to the allocation routines -- malloc, mmap, etc.
    
     The new modes are available via sysctl (same as before).  See
     Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting for more information."
    502bff06
overcommit-accounting 2.04 KB