Hacker News Reader

but again, if it is just about the default behaviour which we debate, one can simply disable the overcommit

vm.overcommit_memory = 2

see https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accou...

And that was exactly the criticism, wasn't it? "Overcommit-by-default nonsense". I didn't write the original, just trying to parse it. (And with that aspect I kind of agree, it's a goofy behavior.)

I guess there's another, somewhat social aspect of making that the default: everyone else coding on the platform assumes the behavior is the other way, so I suspect when you set that flag to off, your other software starts crashing on null pointer dereferences because no one thinks malloc can fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com