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Message-Id: <20080703190123.1d72e9d1.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 19:01:23 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To: balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2.6.26-rc8-mm1] memrlimit: fix mmap_sem deadlock
On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:19:45 +0530 Balbir Singh <balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> Andrew Morton wrote:
> > There doesn't seem to have been much discussion regarding your recent
> > objections to the memrlimit patches. But it caused me to put a big
> > black mark on them. Perhaps sending it all again would be helpful.
>
> Black marks are not good, but there have been some silly issues found with them.
> I have been addressing/answering concerns raised so far. Would you like me to
> fold all patches and fixes and send them out for review again?
>
>
I was referring to the below (which is where the conversation ended).
It questions the basis of the whole feature.
On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:31:05 +0530 Balbir Singh <balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> Hugh Dickins wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > (In passing, I'll add that I'm not a great fan of these memrlimits:
> > to me it's loony to be charging people for virtual address space,
> > it's _virtual_, and process A can have as much as it likes without
> > affecting process B in any way. You're following the lead of RLIMIT_AS,
> > but I've always thought RLIMIT_AS a lame attempt to move into the mmap
> > decade, after RLIMIT_DATA and RLIMIT_STACK no longer made sense.
> >
> > Taking Alan Cox's Committed_AS as a limited resource charged per mm makes
> > much more sense to me: but yes, it's not perfect, and it is a lot harder
> > to get its accounting right, and to maintain that down the line. Okay,
> > you've gone for the easier option of tracking total_vm, getting that
> > right is a more achievable target. And I accept that I may be too
> > pessimistic about it: total_vm may often enough give a rough
> > approximation to something else worth limiting.)
>
> You seem to have read my mind, my motivation for memrlimits is
>
> 1. Administrators to set a limit and be sure that a cgroup cannot consume more
> swap + RSS than the assigned virtual memory limit
> 2. It allows applications to fail gracefully or decide what parts to free up
> to get more memory or change their allocation pattern (a scientific application
> deciding what size of matrix to allocate for example).
>
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