From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3ABF6EA0.A2454B66@linuxjedi.org> Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 11:30:24 -0500 From: "David L. Parsley" MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: memory mgmt/tuning for diskless machines References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, Jonathan Morton List-ID: Rik van Riel wrote: > > On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, David L. Parsley wrote: > > > I'm working on a project for building diskless multimedia terminals/game > > consoles. One issue I'm having is my terminal seems to go OOM and crash > > from time to time. It's strange, I would expect the OOM killer to blow > > away X, but it doesn't - the machine just becomes unresponsive. > > > > Since this is a quasi-embedded platform, what I'd REALLY like to do is > > tune the vm so mallocs fail when freepages falls below a certain point. > > Hi David, > > I think you might want to talk with Jonathan Morton about > your situation. Jonathan is working on a non-overcommit > patch which will make sure no more memory is malloc()ed > than what is available. Thanks Rick, I'll bet you're right. I changed the sysctl registration to make /proc/sys/vm/freepages read-write, and even playing with it for a while it was a no-win. Either 1) the machine would become unresponsive, or 2) X would crash. For embedded systems, the non-over-commit patch is almost certainly the way to go - and we all know how popular embedded Linux is these days. ;-) I'll try to search for his patch in kernel archives and let you know how it works out. Jonathan - if you could ship me the patch I'd appreciate it, but I'll try searching first. regards, David -- David L. Parsley Network Administrator Roanoke College -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/