cvs commit: src/sys/vm vm_kern.c

[Colin Percival]

At 21:05 16/02/2004, Maxime Henrion wrote:
>I find it very convenient to have a flag to tell malloc() to try as hard
>as it can to allocate the memory without crashing on us.

<hat="kernel newbie">
   Is this really good enough?  When I was routinely running my system out
of kernel memory by using a large malloc backed md(4), the panic never
came from a failed allocation in the md code; rather, md would use up all
the available memory, and then some other kernel call (which needed only
some small amount of memory) would panic.
   From a security point of view, I can't see how there's any alternative
to using a user-allocated buffer for such requests.
</hat>

Colin Percival