Comment by smasher164

4 years ago

You're right, "unquantifiable" was the wrong word here. I meant, a program has no real way of predicting/reacting to OOM. I didn't realize mode 2 with overcommit_ratio = 100 behaved that way, thanks for sharing.

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smasher164

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vgel  4 years ago

Yeah I think in a practical sense you're right, since AFAIK using mode 2 is fairly rare because most software assumes overcommit, and even if a program is written with an understanding that malloc can return NULL, its in the sense of

    if (!(ptr = malloc(...))) { exit(1); }