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diff --git a/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000..0dd54bbe4afa5 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting.rst @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ +.. _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). + +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) |