On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, David Brownlee wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, Erich Rast wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for your answers!
> > 
> > I just forgot to say that I *have* 10megs of swap space on the root
> > partition - ok, not much, but should be enough to compile 200 lines of
> > code!!!!??? Also the gunzip problem is a bit more weird: it *sometimes*
> 
> 	Swap space and free space on the root partition are totally
> 	different things - under NetBSD swap space has to be a separate
> 	partition. If you have no swap partition and only 5mb or ram you
> 	are liable to run into unpredictable memory problems...
> 

Which brings up the question: What does NetBSD do when it runs out of 
memory?

Does it recover? Does it fail safely? Does it freak unpredictably?
When several users are using one machine, you definetly dont want one guy 
with a memory allocation bug in his program to take the whole system 
down!

I expect that a lot of userland things wont handle it very well but what 
about the system?

I've always though that the inability for a simple user to bring the 
system to an unusable state without violating security was the strongest 
points of solid UN*X systems. I feel strongly enough about this to try 
and help if necessary.

Sorry, I got carried away, this most probably does not belong in 
port-mac68k but in a more general list.

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"Because user errors often produce unpredictable results, the user
should try to avoid them."