We have found what seems to be a small bug in __vm_enough_memory() when
sysctl_overcommit_memory is set to OVERCOMMIT_NEVER.
When this bug occurs the systems fails to boot, with /sbin/init whining
about fork() returning ENOMEM.
We hunted down the problem to this:
The deferred update mecanism used in vm_acct_memory(), on a SMP system,
allows the vm_committed_space counter to have a negative value.
This should not be a problem since this counter is known to be inaccurate.
But in __vm_enough_memory() this counter is compared to the `allowed'
variable, which is an unsigned long. This comparison is broken since it
will consider the negative values of vm_committed_space to be huge positive
values, resulting in a memory allocation failure.