*BSD News Article 55358


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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD malloc() not returning NULL when vm exhausted ?
Date: 19 Nov 1995 02:44:26 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
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Message-ID: <48m5ma$324@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <48dt9c$r67@news.mel.aone.net.au> <DI5Eq8.JLH@nntpa.cb.att.com>
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dyson@inuxs.inh.att.com (John S. Dyson) wrote:
] I am suprised that the system did not just hang on NetBSD when it is out
] of swap space.  FreeBSD should normally return 0, but in desperation,
] FreeBSD will kill the process.  If you are mallocing memory significantly
] greater than a page?  Like 100 pages???  It is not possible for the system
] to know if you are out of memory until you have faulted the pages...  That
] is a flaw in the way that the MACH VM system does not preallocate swap
] space.  It can be changed, but at a great cost (lots more disk.)

Uh, disks are $0.50/Meg or less.  How much is RAM?

8-).


                                        Terry Lambert
                                        terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.