[Python-Dev] pymalloc killer (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Fri, 29 Mar 2002 18:59:58 -0500

[martin@v.loewis.de]

This sounds quite good. The only flaw is that you need to trust that the machine has paged memory - otherwise, rounding down an arbitrary address to a 4k boundary, and then reading a value may cause an access violation (or may, say, fetch data from some peripheral device, thus starting the coffee machine :-).

pymalloc always relied on that assumption, so that part isn't new.

For the architectures we care about, this seems to be guaranteed; on other architectures, people will need to disable pymalloc.

Either that or buy a reasonable machine . A fair number of people have tried pymalloc by now, and nobody has reported a problem. I suppose they may have been lucky, and that feeding PyMem_{FREE, Free, DEL, Del} into PyMalloc_Free too may greatly strain their luck if so.