> But wouldn't those affect a given process at at time? > Does that means that the OOM-killer is woken up to kill process X when those situations arise on process Y? Not sure I understand the question. > Also, under what conditions would copy-on-write fail? When you have no memory or swap pages free and you touch a COW page that is currently shared. At that point there is no resource to back to the copy so something must die - either the process doing the copy or something else. Alan -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>