From owner-freebsd-current Fri Apr 16 6:11:35 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from europe.std.com (europe.std.com [199.172.62.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 116FE1543B for ; Fri, 16 Apr 1999 06:11:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from lowell@world.std.com) Received: from world.std.com by europe.std.com (STD1.2/BZS-8-1.0) id JAA04027; Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:09:09 -0400 (EDT) Received: by world.std.com (TheWorld/Spike-2.0) id AA06674; Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:09:09 -0400 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: swap on Irix (overcommiting, etc.) References: <199904151934.PAA98792@misha.cisco.com> From: Lowell Gilbert Date: 16 Apr 1999 09:09:09 -0400 In-Reply-To: Mikhail Teterin's message of Thu, 15 Apr 1999 15:34:54 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: Lines: 28 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mikhail Teterin writes: > Sorry. I'm just repeating what Ladavac Marino wrote in > <55586E7391ACD211B9730000C11002761795EB@r-lmh-wi-100.corpnet.at>: > > LM: Please note that memory overcommit architectures are a > LM: rather common optimization; FreeBSD is one of them. They > LM: do, however, break the ISO/ANSI C conformance (strictly > LM: speaking). > > Since there was no immediate (nor later) rebuttal, I assumed, that > everyone quietly agreed... Absolutely not. It is *definitely* okay for system conditions outside the realm of the C spec to effect the execution of "conforming" programs. Otherwise, having a system shutdown interrupt the program would be enough to make the system non-conforming. Heck, the *existence* of kill(1) and SIGKILL would be enough to make for a non-conforming C environment. The system running short on virtual memory (whether it be by having a user program touch memory it had previously allocated, or by having a new user log in, or a new sendmail daemon starting up) fits squarely into that category. How (and when) you assign backing store to virtual memory is a *very* interesting topic, but the ISO C compliance issue is a red herring, even to the most pointlessly pedantic language lawyers. Be well. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message