[Joker_vD]

Well, what's the alternative? Invent a new type of memory reservations specifically to account for tmpfs/ramfs mounts? That'd violate your own stated desired goal of

> The OS should just expose a counter for available memory instead of having applications understand every type of memory reservation.

[drdexebtjl]

I don’t see how it contradicts my goal. I want memory counters that abstract away kernel behavior that the application has no business accounting for.

[Joker_vD]

The applications, frankly, have no business accounting any memory at all outside of what they use themselves via sbrk/mmap.

[drdexebtjl]

I think a memory pressure indicator is useful. For example, if you’re writing a garbage collector, you can choose to hold off from returning pages back to the kernel when the system is under low pressure, and do this more often under high pressure.

[Joker_vD]

That's very, very marginally useful. If your application recently ran GC when the system was under low pressure and freed a bunch of pages (and still holds to them), and then some other application suddenly acquires a lot of memory, your application won't free those pages until next GC happens. Which most likely won't until you've used up all those freed pages, and at that point a lot of swapping will already have had happen.

Explicitly set per-application upper bounds à la GOMEMLIMIT and Java's -Xmx, together with cgroup's enforcement, seem to be much more useful in practice.

Or there was a proposal for some sort of SIGLOWEM signal that would be sent to all processes in the system (with default disposition of "do nothing") that'd allow applications to release some of its non-vital memory holdings: also a much more timelier notification.