Controlling the garbage collector (GC) at RT?

Fri Feb 11 02:16:00 GMT 2005

David Mosberger pointed me at the overcommit-accounting file in the
kernel sources. With Google's help I managed to find it here:
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting?
v=linux-2.6.9
I'm a little surprised that the default rule is aggressive enough for
the allocation to succeed in this case.
Strict accounting seems dubious to me for a general purpose system. I
think it means for example that if you fork a large process in order to
exec
a small helper process, you need double the amount of memory required by
the
large process. (Just before the exec, I logically have two large
processes,
though they might really share 99.9% of their memory.) That's
presumably
the reason it's not the default.
Hans