One part of this issue was that (at least for me, on a no-grow-OM VM) the recursion would use up all memory in less than the time I could move my hands fomr the cmd-d to the interrupt. The apparent non-responsiveness was _not_ because the interrupt was being ignored but becasue the system had already crashed and was spending a long time trying to write out the low space debug log.

I can't find much trace of emails on the subject but I think the low space signal was being whacked and for whatever reason the scheduler wasn't getting around to dealing with it in a way that actually did anything helpful. IT seems that things went wrong somewhat differently on different OSs as well. Dave's change stopped the problem from killing the system.

My brief testing was pretty much the only review it got and if nobody else with more time and other hardware could find time to look at it, well that is the cost of volunteer development. Quite possibly it shouldn't have been harvested without more input but nobody can come along and twist your arm (for example) to look at things. 


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
The computing field is always in need of new cliches.  - Alan Perlis