Subject: Re: userid partitioned swap spaces: note that running out of swap no longer crashes the machine.
To: NetBSD Kernel Technical Discussion List <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/18/1998 20:12:48
On Fri, Dec 18, 1998 at 12:42:17PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > Hm, if it makes sure to touch every page it needs on start-up, it will be
> > safe later. ;-)
> 
> That's not really practical if you're talking about stack space, though
> I suppose a robust C runtime startup could poke out on the stack a bit
> to guarantee a certain amount of space would be available.

Hm.  But there are programs which do _not_ _know_ the amount of memory
they will need.  For example, named keeps growing for several days.
As far as I understand, a process can still run into trouble even if it
touches its pages but needs to allocate more memory tomorrow or next
week.  If someome's Netscape has eaten up all memory by then... bang.

(No, nobody's running Netscape on our name server and nobody ever will.
That was just an example.)

  -jm