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From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>
To: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com>, Jeff Dike <jdike@karaya.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Arch option to touch newly allocated pages
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 15:59:22 +0100
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Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
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On March 5, 2002 07:30 pm, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 01:12:19PM -0500, Jeff Dike wrote:
> > Really?  And you're unconcerned about the impact on the rest of the system
> > of a UML grabbing (say) 128M of memory when it starts up?  Especially if it
> > may never use it?
> 
> Honestly, I think that most people want to know if the system they've setup 
> is overcommited at as early a point as possible: a UML failing at startup 
> with out of memory is better than random segvs at some later point when the 
> system is under load.  Refer to the principle of least surprise.  And if the 
> user truely wants to disable that, well, you can give them a command line 
> option to shoot themselves in the foot with.

Suppose you have 512 MB memory and an equal amount of swap.  You start 8
umls with 64 MB each.  With your and Peter's suggestion, the system always
goes into swap.  Whereas if the memory is only allocated on demand it
probably doesn't.

-- 
Daniel
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