On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:

Jim Gettys writes:

quoted

quoted

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>

quoted

quoted

One of the biggest bitmaps is the background bitmap. So you have a
client that uploads it to X and then goes away. There's nobody to
un-count to by the time X decides to switch to another background.

Actually, the big offenders are things other than the background
bitmap: things like E do absolutely insane things, you would not
believe (or maybe you would).  The background pixmap is generally
in the worst case typically no worse than 4 megabytes (for those
people who are crazy enough to put images up as their root window
on 32 bit deep displays, at 1kX1k resolution).

Still, it would be nice to recover that 4 MB when the system
doesn't have any memory left.

X, and any other big friendly processes, could participate in
memory balancing operations. X could be made to clean out a
font cache when the kernel signals that memory is low. When
the situation becomes serious, X could just mmap /dev/zero over
top of the background image.

Netscape could even be hacked to dump old junk... or if it is
just too leaky, it could exec itself to fix the problem.

Which is all good and well to DELAY the task of the OOM killer
for a few more minutes.

But in the end, there will be a point where you REALLY run out
of memory and you have no other choice than the OOM killer...

(not that I'm against alternative measures, I just think they're
orthagonal to this whole discussion)

regards,

Rik
--
"What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!"
       -- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000

http://www.conectiva.com/		http://www.surriel.com/

--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/