From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 20:16:49 -0300 (BRST) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: [PATCH] VM fix for 2.4.0-test9 & OOM handler In-Reply-To: <200010092313.e99NDQX173855@saturn.cs.uml.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "Albert D. Cahalan" Cc: Jim Gettys , Linus Torvalds , Alan Cox , Andi Kleen , Ingo Molnar , Andrea Arcangeli , Byron Stanoszek , MM mailing list , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > Jim Gettys writes: > >> From: Linus Torvalds > > >> One of the biggest bitmaps is the background bitmap. So you have a > >> client that uploads it to X and then goes away. There's nobody to > >> un-count to by the time X decides to switch to another background. > > > > Actually, the big offenders are things other than the background > > bitmap: things like E do absolutely insane things, you would not > > believe (or maybe you would). The background pixmap is generally > > in the worst case typically no worse than 4 megabytes (for those > > people who are crazy enough to put images up as their root window > > on 32 bit deep displays, at 1kX1k resolution). > > Still, it would be nice to recover that 4 MB when the system > doesn't have any memory left. > > X, and any other big friendly processes, could participate in > memory balancing operations. X could be made to clean out a > font cache when the kernel signals that memory is low. When > the situation becomes serious, X could just mmap /dev/zero over > top of the background image. > > Netscape could even be hacked to dump old junk... or if it is > just too leaky, it could exec itself to fix the problem. Which is all good and well to DELAY the task of the OOM killer for a few more minutes. But in the end, there will be a point where you REALLY run out of memory and you have no other choice than the OOM killer... (not that I'm against alternative measures, I just think they're orthagonal to this whole discussion) regards, Rik -- "What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!" -- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000 http://www.conectiva.com/ http://www.surriel.com/ -- 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/