Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!phigate!philica!adrie
From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: free memory
Keywords: minix, free memory
Message-ID: <683@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 8 Oct 90 14:31:19 GMT
References: <3189@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 21

In article <3189@idunno.Princeton.EDU> tasayco@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Maria Tasayco) writes:
>I wrote a simple program to find out how much free memory is there in
>the heap (or the largest available chunk), at least I hoped that would
>be the result! Instead I found that it returns a much smaller value
>(my setup is an Atari 1040ST with 1MB and around 430kB of free memory
>when Minix boots up): it returns consistently 56kB. I looked into the
>source for sbrk() and it looked OK. Maybe this behaviour is to be
>expected but I don't see why. 

In Minix, every program gets a specified amount of memory. The gap, that
your ST compiler normally assigns to a process, is probably 64KB. 56KB
of this gap is reported to you by your program. To increase the amount
of memory, your program gets, use the `chmem' program:

	chmem =200000 program

and run your program again. It should now report some 189KB of available
memory.

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen