Re: Out of memory management in embedded systems

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On Mon, 1 Oct 2007, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:

In article <[email protected]> you wrote:
Make kernel configuration option? (e.g. disable "over commit"
mis-feature :-)

# egrep . /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_*
/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory:0
/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio:50

keep in mind that disabling overcommit will mean that you need to put more ram in your embeded system to have it run

there can be very significant saving in ram from the fact that a large program can do fork-exec of a small program without having to have enough ram in the system for two copies of the large program.

you get even more savings in most systems from the fact that Linux does copy-on-write when programs fork instead of allocating (and copying) all the memory the program accesses. this allows programs that run multiple copies to use the same memory for most of the requirements.

overcommit by default is optimistic that if the program requesting the memory actually tries to use it there will be enough (both the fork-exec situation and the copy-on-write memory of real forks mean that the system ends up useing much less memory then is theoretically allocated).

switching it to be pessimistic (overcommit 2 IIRC) means that the OOM handler will never kick in, but it means that programs will be told that there isn't any memory when there really is enough for the program to work.


if you think the pessimistic mode makes your embeded device deterministic enough to avoid OOM go for it, but keep in mind that adding the same amount of additional memory would also make the system safe with overcommit (if everything works properly). it's only when you would rather have the system fail an allocation immedialy rather then running any risk of running into trouble later that you want to disable overcommit.

DavidLang
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