FC3 and the oom-killer

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Andy Barclay wrote:

> I am running 2.6.10-1.760_FC3 on my home machine.
>
> The machine has 2 GB of RAM and 4 GB of swap.
>
> I need to run windows XP in a vmware session (for accessing a customer's 
> network with a windows-only vpn).
>
> I have allocated 1596 MB for my XP virtual machine. When I launch the guest 
> OS,
> after a short while, it gets killed.
>
> Looking in /var/log/messages, I find that this is because of the oom-killer. 
> This just sucks. I don't ever want the kernel to randomly kill my processes. 
> After researching this, I found that
> if I echo "2" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory, it is supposed to disable the 
> oom-killer.
>
> I've done this, and I *thought* this was working (I worked for a day without 
> it kicking in), but now, I'm sure the value is "2", but oom-killer is still 
> killing my vm. I've seen notes on the net that say the "2" is not supported 
> yet.
>
> Does anyone know what I can do to stop this thing.....

Reduce the VM memory foootprint?

I have a 512M machine and vmware's recommendation for maximum memory 
footprint is 276M.  (This is VMware-Workstation, not VMX, but I can't 
imagine you need much more unless you are doing some heavy-duty serving 
or computing.)

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs