Re: [PATCH] mm: add config option to select the initial overcommit mode

[One Thousand Gnomes]

> But wouldn't those affect a given process at at time?
> Does that means that the OOM-killer is woken up to kill process X when those situations arise on process Y?

Not sure I understand the question.

> Also, under what conditions would copy-on-write fail?

When you have no memory or swap pages free and you touch a COW page that
is currently shared. At that point there is no resource to back to the
copy so something must die - either the process doing the copy or
something else.

Alan