Is Squeak limited to 512Mbyte process size?

Georg Gollmann gollmann at edvz.tuwien.ac.at
Fri Nov 6 10:34:08 UTC 1998


>At 10:52 Uhr +0100 06.11.1998, Markus Kohler wrote:
>>I'm just curious.
>>I started my mmap Squeak with  520Mbyte and strange things happened.
>>It started up but the process size went to about 140 Mbyte whereas it
>>remained
>>at 5 when I used 500Mbyte.
>>Also Smalltalk bytesLeft gave back around 8 Mbytes of free space ...
>
>Having a quick look at the image there could indeed be a 512 MB limit in
>the garbage collector (browse class var references to
>ObjectMemory>FreeSizeMask). But I could be totally up the creek as well...

Me again :-)

A little further investigation indicates that free chunks of memory can be
at most 512 MB or so (FreeSizeMask := 16r1FFFFFFC).
I dont´t think this precludes a larger image, but the memory setup can´t
just do

ObjectMemory>initializeMemoryFirstFree: firstFree
....
self setSizeOfFree: freeBlock to: (endOfMemory - firstFree).  "bytes
available for oops"
....

but would have to allocate multiple free chunks.
Further code would be needed to allow objects larger than 512 MB, but one
could have very few of those anyway :-)

Georg
----
Dipl.Ing. Georg Gollmann                   TU-Wien, EDV-Zentrum

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