I tried a variation of that program, making the array a global:

/*
 *      Test program with a big matrix.
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define N 10000
float matrix[N][N];

int main( void )
{
    int i;

    printf( "Big Matrix\n\n" );
    printf( "The matrix is %d by %d; it has %d elements.\n", N, N, N*N );
    printf( "It uses %d bytes.\n", sizeof(matrix) );

    for ( i = 0; i < N; i++ ) {
      matrix[i][i] = (float)random();
    }

    printf( "\n" );
    printf( "The last element of the matrix if %12.10f\n", matrix[N-1][N-1] );
    printf( "\n" );

    return 0;
}


And did this:

$ ulimit -m 500000
$ ulimit -d 999999
$ ulimit -a
cpu time (seconds)         unlimited
file size (blocks)         unlimited
data seg size (kbytes)     999999
stack size (kbytes)        2048
core file size (blocks)    unlimited
resident set size (kbytes) 500000
locked-in-memory size (kb) 168716
processes                  80
file descriptors           64

S>dmesg|head

NetBSD 1.5.2 (GENERIC) #0: Mon Aug 20 11:14:38 PDT 2001
cpu0: AMD Athlon Model 4 (Thunderbird) (686-class), 1100.12 MHz
total memory = 511 MB
avail memory = 468 MB
using 6574 buffers containing 26296 KB of memory


$ cc matrix.c -o matrix
$ time ./matrix
Big Matrix

The matrix is 10000 by 10000; it has 100000000 elements.
It uses 400000000 bytes.

zsh: bus error (core dumped)  ./matrix
./matrix  0.00s user 3.18s system 22% cpu 14.350 total

$ ll matrix.core
1398752 -rw-------  1 mac  wheel  400,187,704 Sep 10 12:01 matrix.core




So I'm confused, I have plenty of memory, I increased the limits, and it
still craps out.

Thanks -Mike