Re: killed: out of swap

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	hello.  Is this something madvise(2) could be extended to do?
-thanks
-Brian

On Jun 14,  2:47pm, Mouse wrote:
} Subject: Re: killed: out of swap
} >> What might be interesting is a way to influence the order in which
} >> processes are chosen to kill...
} > I don't see any realistic way of doing anything with that.  It's
} > basically the first process that tries to allocate another page when
} > there are no more.  There are no other processes at that moment in
} > time that have the problem, so why should any of them be considered?
} 
} To answer that, consider the original poster's situation:
} 
} 	> I have a program that keeps malloc()ing (and scribbling a bit
} 	> into the allocated memory) until malloc() fails. The
} 	> intention is to put pressure on the VM system to find out how
} 	> much pool cache memory it can reclaim.
} 
} Such a program would be a prime candidate for declaring itself a
} preferred out-of-swap victim.  SunOS chill(1) - or was it chill(8)? -
} might be another example, though that's of minimal relevance to NetBSD.
} 
} It probably wouldn't be easy - the process which incurred the page
} fault would have to be put to sleep pending the death of the victim
} process - but it could provide for much better behaviour in situations
} like this.
} 
} Perhaps even better would be a way for userland to tell the kernel
} "pretend you're under severe RAM pressure and free what you can"
} without needing to actually run the system out of pages.
} 
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