Re: strange stack limit behavior when allocating more than 2GB mem on 32bit machine

[Joe <longapple@gmail.com>]

Clear. But how comes 2000MB can be allocated when stack limit is unlimited?

$ ulimit -s
unlimited
$ ./malloc 2046
Malloc succeeded
$ ./malloc 2047
malloc failed: Cannot allocate memory           <==== the critical
point for my case is 2046MB

Thanks,
Joe



2009/8/21 Micha³ Nazarewicz <m.nazarewicz@samsung.com>:
> On Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:12:17 +0200, Joe wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for your explanation. However as you can see, I got 2GB mem and
>> ~10GB swap, totally 12GB.
>>
>> With ulimit -s 10240(KB), I can allocate 2.5GB, I guess these are in
>> swap, right?
>> With ulimit -s unlimited, as you said, kernel reserved 1GB, stack
>> reserved 2GB, there are still 12-3=9GB left??
>
> Physical memory and swap are not the only limitations -- the other is
> address space.  On 32-bit x86 systems CPU can address at most 4 GiB
> of RAM[1].  Furthermore, in default configuration of Linux top 1 GiB
> is reserved for kernel.  This means user space application can
> address up to 3GiB of memory.
>
> Now, as Glynn explained:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Glynn Clements wrote:
>>>
>>> If you set a stack size of unlimited, 2 GiB are reserved
>>> for the stack and shared libraries, causing shared libraries to be
>>> mapped at 1GiB and up. This leaves around 860 MiB for the heap.
>>>
>>> The result is that there isn't any area of the address space which is
>>> large enough for a single 2500 MiB allocation:
>
>> Why did malloc failed, instead of allocating this abundant swap space?
>
> malloc(3) failed because it failed to allocate *address space* not memory.
> In default configuration malloc(3) won't fail if there is not enough
> memory anyways (try it yourself -- disable swap and try allocating
> 1.5 GiB).
>
> As you can see on the memory map's Glenn provided:
>
>>> glynn@cerise:~ $ cat /proc/self/maps
>>> 08048000-08053000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 3966484    /bin/cat
>>> 08053000-08054000 r--p 0000a000 08:01 3966484    /bin/cat
>>> 08054000-08055000 rw-p 0000b000 08:01 3966484    /bin/cat
>>> 0a016000-0a038000 rw-p 0a016000 00:00 0          [heap]
>>> 40000000-4001c000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 9785919    /lib/ld-2.9.so
>>> 4001c000-4001d000 r--p 0001b000 08:01 9785919    /lib/ld-2.9.so
>>> 4001d000-4001e000 rw-p 0001c000 08:01 9785919    /lib/ld-2.9.so
>>> 4001e000-4001f000 r-xp 4001e000 00:00 0          [vdso]
>>> 4001f000-40020000 rw-p 4001f000 00:00 0
>>> 40037000-4016f000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 9784624    /lib/libc-2.9.so
>>> 4016f000-40171000 r--p 00138000 08:01 9784624    /lib/libc-2.9.so
>>> 40171000-40172000 rw-p 0013a000 08:01 9784624    /lib/libc-2.9.so
>>> 40172000-40176000 rw-p 40172000 00:00 0
>>> bfb35000-bfb4a000 rw-p bffeb000 00:00 0          [stack]
>
> there is no continuous block of 2 GiB virtual address space (this is
> because Linux changes the location where libraries are mapped).  When
> you request allocation of 2.5 GiB system has to find a large enough
> hole between allocated regions and there isn't any.  See for
> yourself and analyze the hexadecimal numbers on the left column
>
> On 64-bit systems the problem does not occur because applications
> use larger virtual address (48-bit if I'm not mistaken which is
> 256 TiB)
>
>
> PS. Do not top-post.
>
>
> [1] With Physical Address Extension[2] CPU can address more memory (64 GiB)
> but
>    each application can address up to 4GiB anyways so lets ignore it for
> now.
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
>
> --
> Best regards,                                            _     _
>  .o. | Liege of Serenly Enlightened Majesty of         o' \,=./ `o
>  ..o | Computer Science,  Micha³ "mina86" Nazarewicz      (o o)
>  ooo +----<mina86@mina86.com>---<mina86@jabber.org>-ooO----(_)--Ooo--
>
>
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-c-programming" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html