Dan Melomedman wrote:
> This begs the question whether we could have a feature to disable
> overcommit on a sysadmins', or the software's demand.
>
> Doesn't it break a process that wants to preallocate _physical_ memory
> on start-up, and reuse it, without allocating any further memory to
> _guarantee_ it will not fail due to memory allocations over its lifetime?
> If the OS is lying to such software that it has acquired physical memory, but
> the OS will only try to allocate it when it _thinks_ the process needs it,
> this process will still fail if the physycal memory is unavailable at
> that time. Shame!
We already have such feature: it's called mlock(2).
-Maxim