Subject: Re: Replacement for grep(1) (part 2)
To: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 07/13/1999 16:49:57
>:
>:Well, all I can say is:
>:
>:	I'm sure glad you don't have any influence over the code
>:	base I run.
>:
>:        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
>
>    I'm sure the feeling is mutual.  More to the point, I really seriously 
>    doubt that any of the core developers would consider this idea either
>    because it's been rejected in the past and, so far, nobody has offered 
>    anything that hasn't been heard before.  You are welcome to ask them,
>    of course, but that is the feeling I get.  There are much easier ways
>    to accomplish the level of control required.

   I'm not fundamentally opposed to a no-overcommit knob, but I think
implementing it properly is more difficult than people think. There are things
that do implied swap allocation (automatic stack allocation and fork() are
two examples) that make this a difficult problem to solve.
   I wouldn't personally want to run a system with such a knob turned on,
however, and I tend to agree with Matt that there are other better ways to
solve the embedded system case.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org
Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com