Re: fork: out of memory

Re: fork: out of memory

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, David E. Fox wrote:

> > Was that with my patch running, or wery you trying to get it
> > in... On my own system (24Mb) I magaged to compile the kernel
> > with 'make -j5' without any problems...
> 
> Without the patch, i.e., clean 2.1.65 (make bzimage though)
>  
[snip]
> 
> I wrote in the other message that I got it to compile OK. 
> Strangely enough, it failed twice in the same spot (ide.c) which
> I haven't yet experienced. Third time though it worked.

Maybe you should compile in <magic-sysrq> support and try
<sysrq>-M when memory gets tight...
> 
> Strangely enough, I haven't seen any 'cannot fork' messages
> today (yet). I got a slew of them yesterday (over 40 messages
> saying 'cannot fork'). The only real difference is that netscape
> is sitting around. Wierd.
Hmm, strange. You'd expect Netscape to grab loads of memory
so other programs could get even less... Or was it just
'sitting around' and doing nothing:)

grtz,

Rik.

----------
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Re: fork: out of memory

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 27 Nov 1997, Rik van Riel wrote:

> > Memory is getting so inexpensive in some environments, wouldn't it make
> > sense to have an option to reserve DMA-able memory at init time? With 16
> > megs going for $60, it is worth setting aside 4megs or 8 megs which would
> > have to be specially requested.
> 
> 128 k would be enough, the largest DMA buffer allocated by devices
> is 64k in size (soundcard) and ftape uses 3 32k area's. the scsi

On second thought, it doesn't need to be completely free... If
we can also use it for cache/buffer memory... Kicking that out
when we can't find a 64kB area for DMA memory might be bad for
performance (temporarily), but since it is good for stability,
it is a Good Thing (any system outperforms a crashed system :)

in search of a Better Thing (tm),

Rik.

----------
Send Linux memory-management wishes to me: I'm currently looking
for something to hack...