[Gcl-devel] Making use of available ram

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  In the forthcoming gcl release, we will be able to
efficiently make use of >2Gb or physical ram.  

As we compile and load code produced by gcc, possibly arbitrarily at the
users command, this runs afoul of the default memory model used by gcc,
which assumes code refers to addresses at most 2Gb away.  There is a
large memory model free from this restriction, but in the recent past I
have found it to have bugs, which is not surprising given its likely
lack of testing relatively speaking.  

To this end, GCL has a variable si::*code-block-reserve* which can
reserve low memory for code early on and use this until exhausted.  This
is of course a heuristic workaround.  Nevertheless a 10Mb block appears
quite effective.  

The alternative is to limit the heap to 2Gb, which can be done with an
environment variable.

What would most users like to see?

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire                                        address@hidden
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