This post details my adventures with the Linux virtual memory subsystem, and my discovery of a creative way to taunt the OOM (out of memory) killer by accumulating memory in the kernel, rather than in userspace.

Keep reading and you’ll learn:

• Internal details of the Linux kernel’s demand paging implementation
• How to exploit virtual memory to implement highly efficient sparse data structures
• What page tables are and how to calculate the memory overhead incurred by them
• A cute way to get killed by the OOM killer while appearing to consume very little memory (great for parties)

Note: Victor Michel wrote a great follow up to this post here.

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