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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting')
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diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting deleted file mode 100644 index cbfaaa674118..000000000000 --- a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting +++ /dev/null @@ -1,80 +0,0 @@ -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 slightly more memory in this mode. This is the - default. - -1 - Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific - applications. Classic example is code using sparse arrays - and just relying on the virtual memory consisting almost - entirely of zero pages. - -2 - Don't overcommit. The total address space commit - for the system is not permitted to exceed swap + a - configurable amount (default is 50%) of physical RAM. - Depending on the amount 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. - - Useful for applications that want to guarantee their - memory allocations will be available in the future - without having to initialize every page. - -The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl `vm.overcommit_memory'. - -The overcommit amount can be set via `vm.overcommit_ratio' (percentage) -or `vm.overcommit_kbytes' (absolute value). - -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) |