Sys V handling of insufficient swap space.

Mats Wichmann mats at forbrk.UUCP
Mon Mar 9 04:30:33 AEST 1987


How is it relevant that moving the array into the 'data' segment causes
the kernel to be able to detect that the program is bigger than some
compiled-in limit on the size of an image (or its' data segment, anyway)?
That's not what the original question was.

It's a little bit tricky to decide how much stack space to make available
for automatic variables, especially large arrays, in a given system -
because *someone* will exceed whatever limit you set and find your
limit unreasonable. For example, lots of 68000 systems used to (maybe 
still do) settle on 32k simply because it lets you use short addressing 
for all "stack-relative" operations. In that case, it may have been more 
of a compiler-driven choice. If you don't set some sort of limit, you do 
get the chance for the sort of deadlock mentioned in the original
article.

Mats



More information about the Comp.bugs.sys5 mailing list