From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 15:19:48 -0400 (EDT) From: "Richard B. Johnson" Reply-To: root@chaos.analogic.com Subject: Re: [PATCH] strict VM overcommit for stock 2.4 In-Reply-To: <1027018996.1116.136.camel@sinai> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Robert Love Cc: Szakacsits Szabolcs , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 18 Jul 2002, Robert Love wrote: > On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 11:56, Richard B. Johnson wrote: > > > What should have happened is each of the tasks need only about > > 4k until they actually access something. Since they can't possibly > > access everything at once, we need to fault in pages as needed, > > not all at once. This is what 'overcomit' is, and it is necessary. > > Then do not enable strict overcommit, Dick. > > > If you have 'fixed' something so that no RAM ever has to be paged > > you have a badly broken system. > > That is not the intention of Alan or I's work at all. > > Robert Love Okay then. When would it be useful? I read that it would be useful in embedded systems, but everything that will ever run on embedded systems is known at compile time, or is uploaded by something written by an intelligent developer, so I don't think it's useful there. I 'do' embedded systems and have never encountered OOM. I also read about some 'home users' not knowing how to set up there systems. I don't think one CPU cycle should be wasted to protect them, well maybe 10, but that's it. I keep seeing the same thing about protecting root against fork and malloc bombs and I get rather "malloc()" about it. All distributions I have seen, so far, come with `gcc` and `make`. The kiddies can crap all over their kernels at their heart's content. I don't think Linux should be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Cheers, Dick Johnson Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips). Windows-2000/Professional isn't. -- 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-mm.org/