Re: 1.1 memory management issue ??

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

Martin Konold <konold@fiwi02.wiwi.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> I do not get the point! Memory management is the job of the kernel.
> How does it depend on the distribution?

Actually, it's more complicated than that unless you use sbrk
etc. directly.  If you use malloc (in C) or new (in C++) then libc
plays a role in memory management.

I think what's being referred to here is that in earlier versions of
libc (i.e. the one in debian 1.1), free, or delete, didn't actually
return the memory to the kernel.  It just kept it around so that it
could use it later.  There are some reasonable arguments for doing
this (at least for a little while), but it meant that programs that
ran a long time and had fragmented memory usage could have a vm
footprint that grew without bound.  That's even though there were
pages that could be returned to the kernel.

At least that's my understanding.
--
Rob


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