>>>>> "Franz" == Franz Reinhardt <fre@wenglor.de> writes: Franz> Am Dienstag, 1. Juni 2004 09:12 schrieben Sie: >> On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 08:16:52 +0200, Franz Reinhardt wrote: >> > Hi, >> > >> > on my linux system, I've got the following message: >> > _alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed. Killing application foo >> > >> > Can anybody explain me, what's happening ? Is it just a memory leak of >> >> the >> >> > application ? Or has it to do with reusing swapped memory pages ? >> >> It's an out-of-memory kill. You were out of memory. Completely. So the >> kernel decided that the only way to get the page was to kill some >> process. And did so, using SIGKILL. >> Franz> How can this happen ? I mean, you can't allocate new memory if Franz> it's not available, you'll get a NULL-pointer if you try to Franz> malloc(). And if you try to access to that memory, the Franz> application will end up with an segmentation fault. The point is that you haven't got null pointer from malloc, but a valid address, in a valid virtual page, it just happens that there's no physical page to back up the virtual one. Which happens because kernel allocates more virtual pages than physical pages in RAM + swap. ~velco -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
