Re: Out of memory management in embedded systems

["Daniel Spång" <daniel.spang@gmail.com>]

On 9/28/07, linux-os (Dick Johnson) <linux-os@analogic.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, [iso-8859-1] Daniel Spång wrote:
>
> > On 9/28/07, linux-os (Dick Johnson) <linux-os@analogic.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> But an embedded system contains all the software that will
> >> ever be executed on that system! If it is properly designed,
> >> it can never run out of memory because everything it will
> >> ever do is known at design time.
> >
> > Not if its input is not known beforehand. Take a browser in a mobile
> > phone as an example, it does not know at design time how big the web
> > pages are. On the other hand we want to use as much memory as
> > possible, for cache etc., a method that involves the kernel would
> > simplify this and avoids setting manual limits.
> >
> > Daniel
> >
>
> Any networked appliance can (will) throw data away if there are
> no resources available.
>
> The length of a web-page is not relevent, nor is the length
> of any external data. Your example will buffer whatever it
> can and not read anything more from the external source until
> it has resources available unless it is broken.

And how do you determine when no resources are availabe? We are using
overcommit here so malloc() will always return non null.