Am 20.11.2012 um 12:57 schrieb Ingo Weinhold:
There are enough machines out there with < 2 GB on which Haiku runs well
enough. One shouldn't disable virtual memory, but some people do. And in emulation
both is typical even.
Even then, new will still happily return a pointer, even though you have less
RAM + Swap combined. As long as the MMU can create mappings (and that has
nothing to do with the amount of memory on the system or the amount of swap!),
new returns a pointer. new just uses malloc, that's why.
I don't understand this conclusion. Why would it crash when running out of
virtual address space? If all allocations are checked, there's no reason why
the program should misbehave.
If the MMU can't even map something anymore, it means the process already has
to use gigabytes of memory - more than you could ever have using actual memory.
This means something went berserk and allocates in a loop or something. The
exception would then finally terminate it.
A scenario where it actually can crash is when running out of physical memory,
since we over-commit our stacks. Ideally we would deal with that situation
gracefully as well, though that isn't entirely trivial.
That can't be caught anyway. new returns a pointer, even if no memory is
available. On the first write, the memory is actually allocated.
