Re: Two naive questions and a suggestion

[Rik van Riel <H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl>]

On Wed, 25 Nov 1998 ralf@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 24, 1998 at 09:44:32PM -0000, jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:
> 
> > In situation like those above I would like Linux supported a concept
> > like guaranteed processses: if VM is exhausted by one of them then try
> > to get memory by killing non guaranteed processes and only kill the
> > original one if all reamining survivors are guaranteed ones.
> > It would be better for mission critical tasks.
> 
> Long time ago I suggested to make it configurable whether a process
> gets memory which might be overcommited or not.  This leaves
> malloc(x) == NULL to deal with and that's a userland problem anyway. 

Then what would you do when your 250MB non-overcommitting
program needs to do a fork() in order to call /usr/bin/lpr?

Install an extra 250MB of swap? I don't think so :)
These are the situations where sane people want overcommit.

regards,

Rik -- who actually has 250MB of extra swap...
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