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From: "Petr Vandrovec" <VANDROVE@vc.cvut.cz>
Organization: CC CTU Prague
To: Wayne Whitney <whitney@math.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:27:10 MET-1
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Subject: Re: Repost: could ia32 mmap() allocations grow downward?
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On 12 Dec 01 at 22:28, Wayne Whitney wrote:

> BTW, if one were trying to port some code that uses brk() directly and
> even frees memory that way, then it seems that with glibc's malloc(), one
> could make it work by instructing malloc() always to use mmap().

> P.S.  I am 100% sure that the particular application of mine that started
> me thinking about this, MAGMA, uses its own allocator built on top of
> brk() and never calls malloc() itself.

If you have legacy app, how it comes that it uses mmap? And if I do
not use mmap, I have nothing at 1GB:

void main() { sleep(10); brk((void*)0xBF000000); pause(); }

/proc/`pidof x`/maps says during sleep(10):

08048000-080a1000 r-xp 00000000 03:03 230941   /usr/src/linus/x
080a1000-080a5000 rw-p 00058000 03:03 230941   /usr/src/linus/x
080a5000-080a6000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
bffff000-c0000000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0

and after brk() (which suceeded after I did ulimit -d unlimited
and 'echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory') I see:

08048000-080a1000 r-xp 00000000 03:03 230941   /usr/src/linus/x
080a1000-080a5000 rw-p 00058000 03:03 230941   /usr/src/linus/x
080a5000-bf000000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
bffff000-c0000000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0

So maybe MAGMA uses some API which it should not use under any
circumstances... Such as that you linked it with libc6 stdio.
                                                    Best regards,
                                                        Petr Vandrovec
                                                        vandrove@vc.cvut.cz