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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting | 8 |
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting index 706d7ed9d8d2..8eaa2fc4b8fa 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting +++ b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting @@ -8,7 +8,9 @@ The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes default. 1 - Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific - applications. + 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 @@ -18,6 +20,10 @@ The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes 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 percentage is set via `vm.overcommit_ratio'. |