diff --git a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
index f509d4eb20..ccd24a62b4 100644
--- a/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-mapreduce-project/CHANGES.txt
@@ -6,6 +6,9 @@ Trunk (Unreleased)
     MAPREDUCE-5785. Derive heap size or mapreduce.*.memory.mb automatically.
     (Gera Shegalov and Karthik Kambatla via gera)
 
+    MAPREDUCE-5653. DistCp does not honour config-overrides for
+    mapreduce.[map,reduce].memory.mb (Ratandeep Ratti via aw)
+
   NEW FEATURES
 
     MAPREDUCE-778. Rumen Anonymizer. (Amar Kamat and Chris Douglas via amarrk)
diff --git a/hadoop-tools/hadoop-distcp/src/main/resources/distcp-default.xml b/hadoop-tools/hadoop-distcp/src/main/resources/distcp-default.xml
index f50ddddae7..6e1154ef1a 100644
--- a/hadoop-tools/hadoop-distcp/src/main/resources/distcp-default.xml
+++ b/hadoop-tools/hadoop-distcp/src/main/resources/distcp-default.xml
@@ -31,16 +31,6 @@
         <description>Implementation of static input format</description>
     </property>
 
-    <property>
-        <name>mapred.job.map.memory.mb</name>
-        <value>1024</value>
-    </property>
-
-    <property>
-        <name>mapred.job.reduce.memory.mb</name>
-        <value>1024</value>
-    </property>
-
     <property>
         <name>mapred.reducer.new-api</name>
         <value>true</value>