From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 16 15:24:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2CBA237B4C5 for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 15:24:32 -0800 (PST) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id eAGNOLZ18723; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 15:24:21 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 15:24:21 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein To: Ernst de Haan Cc: Sebastiaan van Erk , Zero Sum , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: argument list too long Message-ID: <20001116152421.A18037@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20001116091607.A97857@sebster.com> <00111621362707.00522@shalimar.net.au> <20001116122313.A69018@sebster.com> <00111700205500.61931@shalimar.net.au> <20001116145641.A22842@sebster.com> <20001116105654.G830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001116231731.A14470@c187104187.telekabel.chello.nl> <20001116143843.S830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001117000816.B15150@c187104187.telekabel.chello.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20001117000816.B15150@c187104187.telekabel.chello.nl>; from ernst@jollem.com on Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 12:08:16AM +0100 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Ernst de Haan [001116 15:09] wrote: > > // Never crash out, unless we run out of memory :) And what about Bob down the hall that's screwed because your program just allocated all the kernel memory to pass your super long arglist? What about the next program you want to run? > > Coders that assume inifinite memory are fooling themselves and > > need to learn how to code properly. > > Sure, but so are coders that assume very limited memory! :) I'm not assuming very little memory, I'm assuming that it wouldn't be good if one was able to cause a machine to fail all further execs by just passing a multimegabyte arglist. I do agree that on large memory machines some of these limits should be relaxed, ie somehow scaled to make more efficient usage of the available memory, but they can't be made into potential infinite consumers of resources. The limits are there for protection and there's APIs to determine the limits and workarounds that have existed for years prior to this revelation you call "linked lists". So why not use the tools already available before trying to foster these silly new ways apon us. :-) -- -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message