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+.. _overcommit_accounting:
+
+=====================
+Overcommit Accounting
+=====================
+
+The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes
+
+0
+ Heuristic overcommit handling. Obvious overcommits of address
+ space are refused. Used for a typical system. It ensures a
+ seriously wild allocation fails while allowing overcommit to
+ reduce swap usage. root is allowed to allocate slightly more
+ memory in this mode. This is the default.
+
+1
+ Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific
+ applications. Classic example is code using sparse arrays and
+ just relying on the virtual memory consisting almost entirely
+ of zero pages.
+
+2
+ Don't overcommit. The total address space commit for the
+ system is not permitted to exceed swap + a configurable amount
+ (default is 50%) of physical RAM. Depending on the amount you
+ use, in most situations this means a process will not be
+ killed while accessing pages but will receive errors on memory
+ allocation as appropriate.
+
+ Useful for applications that want to guarantee their memory
+ allocations will be available in the future without having to
+ initialize every page.
+
+The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl ``vm.overcommit_memory``.
+
+The overcommit amount can be set via ``vm.overcommit_ratio`` (percentage)
+or ``vm.overcommit_kbytes`` (absolute value).
+
+The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in
+``/proc/meminfo`` as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively.
+
+Gotchas
+=======
+
+The C language stack growth does an implicit mremap. If you want absolute
+guarantees and run close to the edge you MUST mmap your stack for the
+largest size you think you will need. For typical stack usage this does
+not matter much but it's a corner case if you really really care
+
+In mode 2 the MAP_NORESERVE flag is ignored.
+
+
+How It Works
+============
+
+The overcommit is based on the following rules
+
+For a file backed map
+ | SHARED or READ-only - 0 cost (the file is the map not swap)
+ | PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance
+
+For an anonymous or ``/dev/zero`` map
+ | SHARED - size of mapping
+ | PRIVATE READ-only - 0 cost (but of little use)
+ | PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance
+
+Additional accounting
+ | Pages made writable copies by mmap
+ | shmfs memory drawn from the same pool
+
+Status
+======
+
+* We account mmap memory mappings
+* We account mprotect changes in commit
+* We account mremap changes in size
+* We account brk
+* We account munmap
+* We report the commit status in /proc
+* Account and check on fork
+* Review stack handling/building on exec
+* SHMfs accounting
+* Implement actual limit enforcement
+
+To Do
+=====
+* Account ptrace pages (this is hard)