Re: Memory management in Kernel 2.4.x

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 10:40, Andreas Hartmann wrote:
> Unfortunately, the memory management of kernel 2.4.x didn't get better until 
> today. It is very easy to make a machine dead. Take the following script:
> 
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=malloc+bestie&hl=de&lr=&selm=[e-mail]&rnum=2
> 
> 
> The result with kernel 2.4.19pre8ac4:
> 
> May 27 11:04:21 athlon kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 763 (knode).

This appears to be correct behaviour. You allocated astronomical amounts
of memory and had memory overcommit enabled so it broke. Thats
configurable and you can if you wish disable overcommit in the -ac
kernel by setting /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to 2 (thats not
supported by the base 2.4 kernels yet). If you can make it OOM in that
mode then I am interested indeed. 

The rsync one is more interesting, it could be something doing huge
amounts of memory allocations it could also be excessive kernel usage or
wrong OOM semantics somewhere.