[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 65766] [GTK] OSAllocator::reserveUncommitted should not commit physical memory

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65766





--- Comment #7 from Gavin Barraclough <barraclough at apple.com>  2011-11-29 12:29:50 PST ---
(In reply to comment #6)
>  My opinion here is that if you are setting a '2' in /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory you are pretty much on your own, and something like you mention in comment #5 might be the best solution unless we can find alternate interfaces to allocate VM.

I'm okay with a workaround like this going in, but I'm not sure that it's really helps at all.  It just means that when the OOM killer kicks in, your apps won't randomly get killed - instead it will routinely be the WebKit using app that gets the chop.  That doesn't seem unreasonable – after all, it is likely due to the bug that WebKit commits too much memory that results in the OOM killer deciding to take an app down, so we should take responsibility and let the axe fall on us.  But overall this just makes WebKit less stable – it increase the rate at which WebKit 'crashes' (the fine distinction between a crash and an OOM death likely being uninteresting to the user).

So long as the JIT is designed to run on systems that support allocating VM without committing physical memory (which I don't really see changing) the only real fix seems to be to find a way to allocate VM without committing physical memory.  :o)

If we do land a change like this, we should not close this bug – we still need to track that reserveUncommitted does not work correctly on Linux.

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