Can some throw bright light on Linux Memory Allocation

[Rashkae]

Rashkae wrote:

>>
> 
> It's been a while since I read up on this and and my terminology will be
> way off, (as well, some of my information will be out of date.)
> 
> The short of it, Linux doesn't allocate memory absolutely on malloc.
> You can malloc more memory than you have available, but will fail when
> you application tries to fill this memory and the system runs out.  This
> is a deliberate design decision done for performance and or other
> esoteric reasons beyond my ken.  I also had some sample code of an app
> that would malloc large memory, then try to fill that memory and the app
> itself would in theory end gracefully if the memory proved unavailable.
>  In practice, bad things tend to happen to the whole system once you hit
> OOM.
> 

BTW, first google hit for Linux Memory Allocation
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/11/30/linux-out-of-memory.html