> > I don't like the idea of killing off tasks that request resources
> > that are not presently available.
>
On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
> Have you thought about the problem at
> all?
>
Yep. And so did the guy who designed VAX/VMS. Now VMS is not Unix so
there will be differences. Under VMS, a program was executed in the
context of the current process. You did not have to fork/overwrite as
you do in Unix. Therefore, if a process existed, it did not have to
create another process in order to run some executable. This helped
save on memory usage although Linux fork() and vfork() can usually
work without allocation of any additional memory except stack.
The idea is the notion of a 'swap' file as well as a 'page' file. Linux
uses a 'page' file, even though it's called a swap file. When memory
is low, the kernel will stop allocating new pages to a process. Instead,
it will swap existing pages to disk on a per process basis. In principle,
a process might allocate 1 Gb of buffer, but always be using the same
one physical page. The result is that a memory hog goes slower and slower,
being I/O bound. Other tasks are unaffected except for some slowness of
the kernel because of its increased work load.
Once the swap file is exhausted, the task(s) needing additional memory
will sleep until memory is available (if ever). The result is that the
kernel is never "out of memory". Instead, it's "out of swap". There is
a difference. Tasks that don't need great gobs of memory continue. The
memory hog can be seen and killed by its owner if necessary.
Certainly if a memory hog needs more memory than the virtual memory
available on a system, it can't run on that system. It should not be
allowed to compromise the system. Further, the kernel should not kill
that task. Doing so will prevent the sysadmin from finding the problem
since the evidence will be destroyed. Instead, `ps` would show something
like this:
FLAGS UID PID PPID PRI NI SIZE RSS WCHAN STA TTY TIME COMMAND
140 100 71 1 0 0 12232 0 do_swap_pa S ? 0:02 (mem)
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED
Penguin : Linux version 2.2.6 on an i686 machine (400.59 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/