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Subject: Re: [PATCH] strict VM overcommit
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Szakacsits Szabolcs <szaka@sienet.hu>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>, Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>,
       Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: 21 Jul 2002 14:32:29 +0100
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On Sun, 2002-07-21 at 10:10, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > How is assured that it's impossible to OOM when the amount of memory
> > > shrinks?
> > > IOW:
> > > - allocate very much memory
> > > - "swapoff -a"
> >
> > Make swapoff -a return -ENOMEM
> >
> > I've not done this on the basis that this is root specific stupidity and
> > generally shouldnt be protected against
> 
> Recommended reading: MIT's Magazin of Innovation Technology Review,
> August 2002 issue, cover story: Why Software Is So Bad?
> 
> Next you might read: "... prominent, leading Linux kernel developer
> publically labels users stupid instead of handling a special case

I would suggest you do something quite different. Go and read what K&R
had to say about the design of Unix. One of the design goals of Unix is
that the system does not think it knows better than the administrator.
That is one of the reasons unix works well and is so flexible.

Alan

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