From 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:20:36 -0700 Subject: Linux-2.6.12-rc2 Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip! --- Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 73 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting (limited to 'Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting') diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting new file mode 100644 index 0000000..21c7b1f --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes + +0 - Heuristic overcommit handling. Obvious overcommits of + address space are refused. Used for a typical system. It + ensures a seriously wild allocation fails while allowing + overcommit to reduce swap usage. root is allowed to + allocate slighly more memory in this mode. This is the + default. + +1 - Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific + applications. + +2 - Don't overcommit. The total address space commit + for the system is not permitted to exceed swap + a + configurable percentage (default is 50) of physical RAM. + Depending on the percentage you use, in most situations + this means a process will not be killed while accessing + pages but will receive errors on memory allocation as + appropriate. + +The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl `vm.overcommit_memory'. + +The overcommit percentage is set via `vm.overcommit_ratio'. + +The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in +/proc/meminfo as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively. + +Gotchas +------- + +The C language stack growth does an implicit mremap. If you want absolute +guarantees and run close to the edge you MUST mmap your stack for the +largest size you think you will need. For typical stack usage this does +not matter much but it's a corner case if you really really care + +In mode 2 the MAP_NORESERVE flag is ignored. + + +How It Works +------------ + +The overcommit is based on the following rules + +For a file backed map + SHARED or READ-only - 0 cost (the file is the map not swap) + PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance + +For an anonymous or /dev/zero map + SHARED - size of mapping + PRIVATE READ-only - 0 cost (but of little use) + PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance + +Additional accounting + Pages made writable copies by mmap + shmfs memory drawn from the same pool + +Status +------ + +o We account mmap memory mappings +o We account mprotect changes in commit +o We account mremap changes in size +o We account brk +o We account munmap +o We report the commit status in /proc +o Account and check on fork +o Review stack handling/building on exec +o SHMfs accounting +o Implement actual limit enforcement + +To Do +----- +o Account ptrace pages (this is hard) -- cgit v1.1