I am not sure about x86, but on ia64, you would be very hard pressed for this application to actually run you out of memory. With the memset commented out, you would be allocating vmas, etc, but you would not be actually putting pages behind those virtual addresses. Thanks, Robin --------------------------- test1.c ---------------------------------- #include<stdio.h> #include<string.h> main() { char* buff; int count; count=0; while(1) { printf("\nOOM Test: Counter = %d", count); buff = (char*) malloc(1024); // memset(buff,'\0',1024); count++; if (buff==NULL) { printf("\nOOM Test: Memory allocation error"); } } } -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/