Mac Intel

[Mikael Pettersson]

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:51:33 -0700, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>On 8/12/06, Joel Reymont <joelr1@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 12, 2006, at 10:24 PM, Mikael Pettersson wrote:
>>
>> > "region"? Assuming it's Erlang being unable to allocate more
>> > memory, you should run the same test case (big_binary) in BEAM
>> > to determine if the problem is HiPE-related or not.
>> >
>> > (Just c(big_binary) followed by big_binary:test() in the Erlang
>> > shell.)
>>
>> Same result as with HiPE. Trace below. I have 2Gb of physical memory.
>> Any tips?
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.5 [source] [async-threads:0] [hipe]
>>
>> Eshell V5.5  (abort with ^G)
>> 1> c(big_binary).
>> {ok,big_binary}
>> 2> big_binary:test().
>> beam(28985,0xa000cf60) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=1074790400)
>> failed (error code=3)
>>       beam(28985,0xa000cf60) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
>>
>
>This error means that there's not enough space left in the VM to
>acquire that much RAM. You should get the same error on PPC unless
>they've done something to work around it.
>
>One common cause of this is attempting to use the realloc() call in
>hopes of shrinking a large allocation. That does not ever happen on
>Mac OS X. realloc(ptr, N) where N is <= size currently allocated is
>always a no-op (no other VM does this "optimization" to my knowledge).
>If you download the libc source from Apple and look at the
>implementation it's pretty clear that this is the case.

What's strange is that we've been running this test on
a lowly ppc32 with 256MB ram and OSX 10.3.9 for ages, and
it's never failed on us. So it looks like something unique
either to OSX 10.4 or the x86 version of OSX. In any case,
it's not a HiPE error and should be reported to erlang-bugs.