Re: non-automated test failure report! :)

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011, David Holland wrote:

> As I said in my previous mail, allocating a page of swap for every
> page that *might* get created by the above mechanisms generally
> results in allocating vast quantities of swap that are never used.
> It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a switch to do this, but in
> almost no cases will anyone want to turn it on.

Frankly I disagree.  If you want a robust, stable production system you 
want to not overcommit memory.  You only want to turn the checks off if 
you don't care about the stability of the machine.  If you want to play on 
the wild side then you might want to enable overcommit by a certain 
percentage.  But now you don't have that option.  The machine runs fine 
until it falls over.

> As I recall there was a lengthy and fairly high-content discussion of
> this on lkml a few years back during the last round of major work on
> their OOM-killer. I don't remember the thread title but asking Google
> about "linux OOM" will probably turn it up.

Since when have we started taking design advice from linux?  Linux is 
supposed to be a "desktop OS" so cheapness is more important than 
stability.  That's not the decision you want to make for a server. 
Automatically killing random processes is *EVIL*.  Killing fsflush without 
restarting it is a bad thing.

Eduardo