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