(unknown charset) Re: sbrk(2) broken

Kostik Belousov wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 08:54:38AM -0500, Skip Ford wrote:
> > Robert Watson wrote:
> > > On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> > > >Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > > >>The right answer is presumably to introduce a new LIMIT_SWAP, which
> > > >>limits the allocation of anonymous memory by processes, and size it to
> > > >>something like 90% of swap space by default.
> > > >
> > > >Not a good solution on its own.  You need a per-process limit as well, 
> > > >otherwise a malloc() bomb will still cause other processes to fail 
> > > >randomly.
> > > 
> > > That was what I had in mind, the above should read RLIMIT_SWAP.
> > 
> > Are you referring to the implementation of RLIMIT_SWAP in the
> > overcommit-disable patch at:
> > 
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/overcommit/index.html
> > 
> > ...or some other as yet unwritten implementation?  That patch doesn't
> > currently do 90% of swap but easily can.  That's been available for almost 3
> > years now.  I tested it at one point but not lately and it never went into
> > production.  Do you, and others, have a problem with that implementation?
> Oh, I thought that I was the sole user of the patch. What problems did you
> encountered while testing it ?

Nope, there are two of us. :-)

I don't remember encountering problems.  I never put it into production
because maintaining it in a local branch was beyond my ability.  I just didn't
know enough to know what it did and didn't do, or how it would have to be
modified to work with future changes.  I just didn't understand it enough
to go with it and maintain it.

> What you mean by "do 90% of swap" ?

I was referring only to what Robert said above, that he thinks RLIMIT_SWAP
should limit anon memory size to ~90% of swap by default.  Your patch,
last I looked, limits it to 100% of swap by design but could be easily
changed I think.

-- 
Skip