> Followup to: <1022513156.1126.289.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk>
> By author: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>>
>> On a -ac kernel with mode 2 or 3 set for overcommit you have to run out
>> of kernel resources to hang the box. It won't go OOM because it can't.
>> That wouldn't be a VM bug but a leak or poor handling of kernel
>> allocations somewhere. Sadly the changes needed to do that (beancounter
>> patch) were things Linus never accepted for 2.4
>>
>
> Well, if you can't fork a new process because that would push you into
> overcommit, then you usually can't actually do anything useful on the
> machine.
you can't do _anything_, if the overcommitment range has been reached. Even
running programms are crashing if they want to have some more memory. So,
new processes cannot be started and old processes cannot run and are
crashing as far as they want to have more memory. At last, there will be
only one user-process on the machine running - the bad programm, eating up
all the memory.
Regards,
Andreas Hartmann
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