hello. Is this something madvise(2) could be extended to do? -thanks -Brian
On Jun 14, 2:47pm, Mouse wrote: } Subject: Re: killed: out of swap } >> What might be interesting is a way to influence the order in which } >> processes are chosen to kill... } > I don't see any realistic way of doing anything with that. It's } > basically the first process that tries to allocate another page when } > there are no more. There are no other processes at that moment in } > time that have the problem, so why should any of them be considered? } } To answer that, consider the original poster's situation: } } > I have a program that keeps malloc()ing (and scribbling a bit } > into the allocated memory) until malloc() fails. The } > intention is to put pressure on the VM system to find out how } > much pool cache memory it can reclaim. } } Such a program would be a prime candidate for declaring itself a } preferred out-of-swap victim. SunOS chill(1) - or was it chill(8)? - } might be another example, though that's of minimal relevance to NetBSD. } } It probably wouldn't be easy - the process which incurred the page } fault would have to be put to sleep pending the death of the victim } process - but it could provide for much better behaviour in situations } like this. } } Perhaps even better would be a way for userland to tell the kernel } "pretend you're under severe RAM pressure and free what you can" } without needing to actually run the system out of pages. } } /~\ The ASCII Mouse } \ / Ribbon Campaign } X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org } / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B >-- End of excerpt from Mouse