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diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst deleted file mode 100644 index 1addb0c374a4..000000000000 --- a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst +++ /dev/null @@ -1,88 +0,0 @@ -.. _overcommit_accounting: - -===================== -Overcommit Accounting -===================== - -The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes - -0 - Heuristic overcommit handling. Obvious overcommits of address - space are refused. Used for a typical system. It ensures a - seriously wild allocation fails while allowing overcommit to - reduce swap usage. root is allowed to allocate slightly more - memory in this mode. This is the default. - -1 - Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific - applications. Classic example is code using sparse arrays and - just relying on the virtual memory consisting almost entirely - of zero pages. - -2 - Don't overcommit. The total address space commit for the - system is not permitted to exceed swap + a configurable amount - (default is 50%) of physical RAM. Depending on the amount you - use, in most situations this means a process will not be - killed while accessing pages but will receive errors on memory - allocation as appropriate. - - Useful for applications that want to guarantee their memory - allocations will be available in the future without having to - initialize every page. - -The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl ``vm.overcommit_memory``. - -The overcommit amount can be set via ``vm.overcommit_ratio`` (percentage) -or ``vm.overcommit_kbytes`` (absolute value). These only have an effect -when ``vm.overcommit_memory`` is set to 2. - -The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in -``/proc/meminfo`` as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively. - -Gotchas -======= - -The C language stack growth does an implicit mremap. If you want absolute -guarantees and run close to the edge you MUST mmap your stack for the -largest size you think you will need. For typical stack usage this does -not matter much but it's a corner case if you really really care - -In mode 2 the MAP_NORESERVE flag is ignored. - - -How It Works -============ - -The overcommit is based on the following rules - -For a file backed map - | SHARED or READ-only - 0 cost (the file is the map not swap) - | PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance - -For an anonymous or ``/dev/zero`` map - | SHARED - size of mapping - | PRIVATE READ-only - 0 cost (but of little use) - | PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance - -Additional accounting - | Pages made writable copies by mmap - | shmfs memory drawn from the same pool - -Status -====== - -* We account mmap memory mappings -* We account mprotect changes in commit -* We account mremap changes in size -* We account brk -* We account munmap -* We report the commit status in /proc -* Account and check on fork -* Review stack handling/building on exec -* SHMfs accounting -* Implement actual limit enforcement - -To Do -===== -* Account ptrace pages (this is hard) |