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Date:      Fri, 4 Jan 2008 13:24:28 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
Cc:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Jason Evans <jasone@freebsd.org>, Igor Mozolevsky <igor@hybrid-lab.co.uk>
Subject:   Re: sbrk(2) broken
Message-ID:  <20080104132310.X77222@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <86abnlag4t.fsf@ds4.des.no>
References:  <86myrlahee.fsf@ds4.des.no> <5647.1199451237@critter.freebsd.dk> <a2b6592c0801040503j650046f5k73895b5b0c84025d@mail.gmail.com> <86abnlag4t.fsf@ds4.des.no>

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On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav wrote:

> "Igor Mozolevsky" <igor@hybrid-lab.co.uk> writes:
>> This makes memory management in the userland hideously and unnecessarily=
=20
>> complicated. It's simpler to have SIGDANGER [...]
>
> You don't seem to understand what Poul-Henning was trying to point out,=
=20
> which is that broadcasting SIGDANGER can make a bad situation much, much=
=20
> worse by waking up and paging in every single process in the system,=20
> including processes that are blocked and wouldn't otherwise run for sever=
al=20
> minutes, hours or even days (getty, inetd, sshd, mountd, even nfsd / nfsi=
od=20
> in some cases can sleep for days at a time waiting for I/O)

Another aspect of the problem is that applications have come to depend in=
=20
malloc(3) returning NULL when memory is getting tight, and while we have ne=
ver=20
done exactly that, we have historically had malloc(3) return NULL when we g=
et=20
close to the process data segment size.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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