On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 07:33, Andrew Haley <a...@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. >
