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-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)