From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat Feb 24 23:45:33 2001
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To: seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach)
Subject: Re: Setting memory allocators for library functions. 
Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 24 Feb 2001 15:17:27 CST."
		<200102242117.f1OLHR619234@guild.plethora.net> 
References: <200102242117.f1OLHR619234@guild.plethora.net>  
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 00:45:25 -0700
From: Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
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In message <200102242117.f1OLHR619234@guild.plethora.net> Peter Seebach writes:
: In message <9631.983048712@critter>, Poul-Henning Kamp writes:
: >No it is not and it never was.
: 
: The C committee believes it is.

I do not believe you.  Such a "believe" does not appear to be embodied
in the C-99 standard.

The standard (well draft standard) says:

       7.20.3.3  The malloc function

       Synopsis

       [#1]

               #include <stdlib.h>
               void *malloc(size_t size);

       Description

       [#2] The malloc function allocates space for an object whose
       size is specified by size and whose value is  indeterminate.

       Returns

       [#3]  The malloc function returns either a null pointer or a
       pointer to the allocated space.

Notice that no guarantees about the ability to use all the space, or
that it is somehow guaranteed to be there.  It just says that that
space is allocated.  Nothing more and nothing less.  I defy you to
quote me someting from the standard that is contrary to my position.
I searched through the standard extensively to see if "allocates
space" is defined and couldn't find anything other than 'the poitner
can be used to access the space allocated.'  There appear to be no
guarantees that you can always use all of the memory that you've
allocated, the performance characterstics of accessing said memory or
anything else.

Do not read too much into the above words.  They mean exactly what
they say.  FreeBSD is in compliance.  The space is indeed allocated to
the process address space.  System resource issues might get in the
way of being able to use that, but that's true of anything you
allocate.

Warner

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