malloc (was: making a request to IBM)

[Dennis Ferguson]

In article <6670 at awdprime.UUCP> jfh at greenber.austin.ibm.com (John F Haugh II) writes:
>In article <1991Apr14.030748.18052 at gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> dennis at gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Dennis Ferguson) writes:
>>I'm old enough to have used vanilla Version 7 Unix when PDP-11s were in
>>vogue, and to be brutally frank the only Unix I can remember using
>>which panic'd when it ran out of memory was an early AIX on an RT, a system
>>which I hardly think qualifies as The Definitive Unix.
>
>UNIX v7 would panic if it ran out of swap space, as would System III,
>4.0, 5.0, and every swapping UNIX AT&T released.  The PDP-11/45 I
>learned UNIX on seldom panic'd because it seldom had the load needed
>to run out of swap space.  Other v7-based systems, such as Microsoft's
>original Xenix, would run on machines which were capable of being
>overloaded to the point of running out of swap space.  I regularly
>saw a client's MC68000-based Xenix system run out of swap space.  It
>had 768K RAM and 2MB of swap.

This is indeed correct, certainly as far as V7 (and V6, for that matter)
is concerned (we have those on line).  I should have looked before
leaping.  I do note, however, that the oldest BSD source we have around
(4.1, circa 1981) doesn't panic, nor does the oldest AT&T source
(System V release 1?  Files are all dated February, 1985).  This is not
a problem which was only recently fixed.

>This is not to serve an as excuse for any vendor's kernel bloat or
>utility creeping featurism, but rather to simply point out that if
>you use more than what you have, you will always see some bizarre
>behavior, and always have seen same.

This is very true.

Dennis Ferguson
University of Toronto