Re: Removing sbrk and brk

[Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org>]

On 22/12/13 00:40, Rich Felker wrote:
> Finally, another alternative might be leaving sbrk/brk alone and
> modifying malloc not to use the brk at all. This has been proposed
> several times (well, supporting non-brk allocation has been proposed
> anyway) to avoid spurious malloc failures when the brk cannot be
> extended, and if we support that we might as well just drop brk
> support in malloc (otherwise there's code with duplicate functionality
> and thus more bloat). So this might actually be the best long-term
> option. Switching malloc from using brk to PROT_NONE/mprotect (see the
> above idea for brk emulation) would also make the malloc
> implementation more portable to systems with no concept of brk.
> However this option would definitely be a post-1.0 development
> direction, and not something we could do right away (of course I'd
> probably hold off until after 1.0 for any of these changes since
> they're fairly invasive, except possibly the idea of making sbrk
> always-fail).

I'd add compile time and runtime warnings and plan for post-1.0

lu