Review request for 5049299

[Martin Buchholz]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 07:33, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:

>
> Isn't there some point at which you have to say to a Linux user "Your
> system is simply misconfigured.  Fix the overcommit parameter and this
> problem will go away"  ?
>

99% of users will use the default value of the overcommit parameter
and we have to try to make that work well.

I have thought about what we could do to fix Linux generally.
Perhaps we could have a variant of fork() that promised the kernel
that we are about to exec.  Then the COW'ed pages after fork wouldn't
count towards overcommit.  If memory was *very* tight, one could
suspend all the threads in the parent process until the child exec'ed,
to minimize the number of pages that were written to in the parent.

Martin


>
> Andrew.
>
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