Why kernel kills processes that run out of memory instead of just failing memory allocation system calls?

[Ilya Orehov]

+------- Yuri, 2009-05-20 -------
| Seems like failing system calls (mmap and sbrk) that allocate memory is more
| graceful and would allow the program to at least issue the reasonable 
| error message.
| And more intelligent programs would be able to reduce used memory 
| instead of just dying.

Hi!

You can set memory limit to achieve your goal:

tcsh% limit vmemoryuse 20M

In this case, malloc(1000000000) will return 0.

Ilya.

| 
| Yuri
| 
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