the way I read it, malloc(M_WAITOK) will panic rather than wait any time
the exhausted resource is virtual space in kmem_map rather than physical
pages.  this can happen even if it's only trying to allocate one virtual
page, the allocation size being small just makes it less likely.

-Chuck


On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 11:15:42PM +0100, Jaromir Dolecek wrote:
> Chuck Silvers wrote:
> > the trouble I have with this M_CANFAIL flag is exactly the point that
> > you mention below:  even if we can recover from the file-descriptor
> > allocation failure, kmem_map is still almost entirely full and so the
> > next malloc() call is likely to panic the machine anyway.
> 
> Up to now, I though that only requests for clearly too big chunk
> would fail with M_WAITOK. i.e. even if most of kva is allocated/used,
> all the other malloc(9) calls with M_WAITOK would wait for the
> memory to become available, rather than fail (and panic).
> Is this not true?
> 
> Jaromir 
> -- 
> Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org> http://www.NetBSD.org/Ports/i386/ps2.html
> -=  Those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve  =-
> -=  neither liberty nor safety, and will lose both.  -- Benjamin Franklin  =-