On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 4:34 AM, David Given <d...@cowlark.com> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I was rather startled recently to notice that the standard Android
> kernel appears to have the memory overcommit setting set to 1. This is
> --- as far as I can tell, the numbering got changed not long ago and not
> all the documentation has been updated --- these means 'allow all memory
> allocations even if no RAM+swap is available'.
>
> The knock on effect of this is that running out of memory will cause
> either a memory trap in the application or else the OOM killer will nuke
> your entire process without warning.
>
> Can anyone comment on this? I know, for example, that the Android patch
> has modified the OOM killer. I would have thought that memory overcommit
> should be disabled on this kind of embedded device?
>
>
To make things cleared, memory overcommit is a good thing in environments
where there are tons of copy-on-write shared pages between processes (which
is typical of Android), with very few copies in practice.

If we were to disable it, the system would barely run with the current
amount
of memory.


> --
> ┌─── dg@cowlark.com ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
> │
> │ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
> │ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan
>
>
> >
>

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