[Python-Dev] pymalloc killer

[Tim Peters]

[martin@v.loewis.de]
> This sounds quite good. The only flaw is that you need to trust that
> the machine has paged memory - otherwise, rounding down an arbitrary
> address to a 4k boundary, and then reading a value may cause an access
> violation (or may, say, fetch data from some peripheral device, thus
> starting the coffee machine :-).

pymalloc always relied on that assumption, so that part isn't new.

> For the architectures we care about, this seems to be guaranteed; on
> other architectures, people will need to disable pymalloc.

Either that or buy a reasonable machine <wink>.  A fair number of people
have tried pymalloc by now, and nobody has reported a problem.  I suppose
they may have been lucky, and that feeding PyMem_{FREE, Free, DEL, Del} into
PyMalloc_Free too may greatly strain their luck if so.