Re: Advice requested: how big can we be?

["Kaveh R. Ghazi" <ghazi at caip dot rutgers dot edu>]

 >  > > Is this unreasonable?  Should we be able to build on boxes with
 >  > > less swap than that?  Or shall we just say "512M swap or don't
 >  > > bother building libgcj" ?
 >  > 
 >  > Then let's add a configure check -
 > 
 > How?
 > 

Well to answer your question, write a snippet which uses malloc:

	foo = malloc (512Mb)
	if (!foo)
	  return bad;
	memset (foo, 0, 512Mb)
	return good;

You have to make sure to access the returned memory with memset or
something.  E.g. on some versions of Irix, when you exceed the
available swap, malloc would return a valid pointer but you'd crash
when you accessed the memory.  See the end of this message:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-05/msg01012.html

Having said all that, I'm ambivalent about whether doing this is a
good thing.

		--Kaveh
--
Kaveh R. Ghazi			ghazi@caip.rutgers.edu