As we all know, there are two ways to get something implemented in the
Linux kernel: Do it yourself or bitch about it on the kernel mailing
list and hope that somebody does it. Here I am, doing the latter:
Memory overcommitting is a relatively good idea in the world of
memory-hogging software. However, sometimes the results are not too nice.
Now, I was wondering that it'd be nice to have the maximum amount be
tunable, for example via a /proc entry. The amount of overcommitting
allowed could be presented in pages, so that the tuning is as
fine-grained as possible throughout the memory area (so that you could
disable overcommitting altogether or not to impose any limits). If the
parameter would be changed and the overcommitting would already be
higher than that, then all requests for more memory would fail until
enough would be freed.
Anyway, just a suggestion. Maybe, if nobody else will do it, I will look
into it more someday when I have the time. Should learn some kernel hacking
anyway...
-- Mikko Rauhala, sivari - mjr@iki.fi - http://www.iki.fi/mjr/