vfork: out of memory, when there's plenty of swap free

Thomas Pornin (pornin@bolet.ens.fr)
Sun, 14 Mar 1999 00:59:58 +0100

According to Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> > run make -j and watch. Peak swap usage gets to 50Meg or so, then it
> > starts dying with vfork: out of memory. [Can someone reproduce these,
> > please?]
>
> Yes I can reproduce the running out of 8K block problem easily. Its the
> lack of a memory defragmentation goal in the current 2.2 vm

Maybe this is not the problem. I could reproduce the problem on my desk
station, an Alpha with 576MB ram. It appeared that it was just a problem
of maximum process per user: when you already have 256 process (the
maximum default per user), vfork() reports ENOMEM. A "make -j" on the
kernel would fail with "vfork: out of memory". A minor modification to
include/linux/tasks.h corrected the problem.

--Thomas Pornin

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