xmallocing

[P. D. Feighery]

Hello, I was testing out the kernel environment on our risc 6k and ran into
an interesting feature.  I'm hoping someone could shed some light it.

I wanted to make sure the IBM did garbage collection in the kernel
environment, so I wrote a little program that would xmalloc memory from the
kernel_heap.

The program simply xmalloced until the xmalloc failed.  Then I xfreed bits and
pieces from various areas and tried to xmalloc the sum of the pieces I xfreed.
Well, I had to xmalloc 230 Meg until the xmalloc failed.  What I think is
happening is that the IBM is paging back and forth to the regions on our
disk which haven't been allocated to a particular partition.  Is this true?

Pat Feighery
feighery at fluky.mitre.org