On Fri, 21 Nov 1997 10:36:06 +0100 
 Paul Sijben <sijben@acm.org> wrote:

 > I am seing the same problem on my server machine (8Meg RAM, 32 MEG swap, yes
 > it's enabled). 
 > 
 > I would really like a process (like a compile) to simply abort and release its
 > memory before the entire system is blocked. Any idea how I can produce such
 > behaviour?

Unfortunately, given the structure of the current VM system, that's
difficult to do.

What needs to happen is the VM system needs to keep track of all mappings
that could allocate backing store from the swappager.  When these mappings
consume all of swap, the mappings need to start failing.  This, of course,
breaks sparse address spaces, so you'd need some way of saying "give me
all the address space that I want, but if you later fail to allocate
backing store, kill me" on a per-process basis.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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