malloc (was: making a request to IBM)

[John F Haugh II]

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 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.

Disclaimer: I speak for myself only.  All trademarks are property of
	their respective trademark owners.
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