hard memory limits

[Mike Meyer]

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:

> James Stroud wrote:
>
>> > does Mac OS X ship with memory limits set by default?  isn't that
>> > a single-user system?
>>
>> Dear original poster or whoever is interested in OS X:
>>
>> OS X is not a single user system. It is BSD based unix. And its fv at king
>> sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! (Though I'm using only Linux right now :o/
>
> So why would Apple insist on setting unusably low process limits, when
> the others don't?

You're making an unwarranted assumption here - that the OP wasn't
creating a large process of some kind. IIRC, all we ever saw was the
size of the request that triggered the error, with no indication of
the total process size.

FWIW, OS X has a Mach kernel. The failing vm_malloc call listed in the
OP is a Mach call, not a Unix call. These days, the userland code is
largely FreeBSD. It used to include "the best of" OpenBSD, NetBSD and
FreeBSD at a relatively small level, but that headache was dropped in
favor of tracking one external system. The legacy of the mixed
heritage is utilities from NetBSD and OpenBSD that aren't in
FreeBSD. shlock comes to mind as an obvious example.

         <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.