Got it cleared. BTW, nice example ... US Banking System :-) __ tharindu.info "those that can, do. Those that can’t, complain." -- Linus On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 24 May 2010 10:26:39 +0100 > Tharindu Rukshan Bamunuarachchi <btharindu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> thankx a lot Hugh ... I will try this out ... (bit harder patch >> already patched SLES kernel :-p ) .... >> >> BTW, what does Alan means by "strict overcommit" ? > > Strict overcommit works like banks should. It tries to ensure that at any > point it has sufficient swap and memory to fulfill any possible use of > allocated address space. So in strict overcommit mode you should almost > never see an OOM kill (there are perverse cases as always), but you will > need a lot more swap that may well never be used. > > In the normal mode the kernel works like the US banking system and makes > speculative guesses that all the resources it hands out will never be > needed at once. That has the corresponding risk that one day it might at > which point you get a meltdown (or in the kernel case OOM kills) > > Alan > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href