Re: Newbie question on malloc()

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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On Thu, 2004-06-03 04:34:27 +0300, Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il>
wrote in message <20040603013427.GD2562@luna.mooo.com>:
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 08:37:34PM +0200, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> > Well, that all depends on the definition of "OS". Any recent 32+ bit
> > operating system with virtual memory capabilities and multi-processing
> > will reclaim malloc()ed RAM upon process termination.
> 
> It has nothing to do with virtual memory. In any multi-processing OS
> (any modern one probably) memory allocations are done by the kernel
> since the kernel is the one managing the system's memory.
> 
> If the kernel doesn't have a bug, this memory is released on process
> exit (unless it is still used by another process such as with fork with
> virtual memory where it is marked copy on write).

Read again. There ARE (or at least: were) operating systems that
intentionally did *not* implicitely free memory. If an application
missed to free all allocated memory, it's lost. Forever.

But modern OSes (those with at least have the capabilities mentioned
above) will automatically reclaim all of a exit'ed process' memory.

MfG, JBG

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