Re: [debian-knoppix] Undefined behaviour after some uptime
Am Freitag, 3. Januar 2003 17:07 schrieb Valentijn Sessink:
> At Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 01:13:41PM +0100, Nils Magnus wrote:
> > longer time or when running memory consuming applications like mozilla,
> > ethereal with large dumps, ettercap or stuff like that. At times either
> > those applications or the KDE components seem to crash.
> >
> > I would expect the kernel to deny allocation of new pages/processes if
> > there is not enough memory left but rather not crashing arbitrarily
> > applications. Has anyone else experienced this behavior? Personally, I
>
> No, but I did not run Knoppix for longer time. But what you are
> experiencing seems like the standard "opportunistic" memory management:
> Linux hands out more memory than there's actually there. When a certain
> program starts using a memory page that is not actually there anymore,
> there is no solution but to kill of a random program.
>
> There are patches that make Linux behave more correct - but this will
> probably restrict your Knoppix usage even more.
Well, this is something, AFAIK from the myth collection. Linux did overcommit
memory. Notice that the sentence is in the past tense. Current kernels do not
do this anymore by default.
andreas@andi-lap:~$ cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
0
andreas@andi-lap:~$ uname -a
Linux andi-lap 2.4.20 #5 Mit Jan 1 18:55:35 CET 2003 i686 AMD Duron(tm)
Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
Seems that overcommiting is nowadays a runtime switchable option :)
Andreas
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