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Subject: Re: [PATCH] strict VM overcommit
From: Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>
To: Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, alan@redhat.com
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On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 15:08, Adrian Bunk wrote:

> Out of interest:
> 
> How is assured that it's impossible to OOM when the amount of memory
> shrinks?
> 
> IOW:
> - allocate very much memory
> - "swapoff -a"

Well, seriously: don't do that.

But `swapoff' will not succeed if there is not enough swap or physical
memory to move the pages to... if it does succeed, then there is enough
storage elsewhere.  At that point, you are not OOM but you may now have
more address space allocated than the strict accounting would typically
allow - thus no allocations will succeed so you should not be able to
OOM.

	Robert Love

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