malloc does not return null when out of memory

[Don Lewis]

On 24 Jul, Brent Casavant wrote:
> [hopefully I didn't mess up the attribution, replying to a digest sucks]
> 
> On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Jamie Bowden wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Don Lewis wrote:
>>
>> > On 23 Jul, Brooks Davis wrote:
>>
>> > > No there isn't.  Overcommit is a fundamental design feature of the BSD
>> > > VM.  If you don't like it, find an OS that doesn't do it.  The only one
>> > > I can think of off the top of my head in Irix where I've found it to be
>> > > a serious pain in the ass.
>>
>> Irix allows for use of what it calls 'vswap' as well, which is just a file
>> that lives on a normal filesystem that the system can fall back on when
>> actual RAM and swap are exhausted.  It allows for extremely large commits
>> on memory limited systems while guaranteeing that it has somewhere to page
>> out to if necessary.  The poster above may not like Irix, but I do.
>> There's a lot of good stuff in there, but SGI aren't the best at telling
>> people it exists and how to use it.
> 
> Almost.  Having actually worked on the IRIX VM system, and on vswap
> issues in particular...
> 
> Don is correct in that IRIX doesn't overcommit.  But that is only
> the default swap configuration.

I didn't say this, Jamie did.