Re: Mirage/kFreeBSD on GitHub

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6 Aug 2012, at 16:31, PALI Gabor Janos <pgj@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 04, 2012 at 07:56:00PM -0400, Robert N. M. Watson wrote:
>> I'm not sure what tolerance OCaml has for allocation failures at lower
>> levels, but you might consider using M_NOWAIT [..] returning a failure
>> when memory is exhausted.
> 
> This seems to be a good solution as the OCaml run-time system answers
> such situations with an Out_of_Memory exception which is now mapped as
> a panic() in the kernel.
> 
> By the way, I have found the cause why the garbage collector was not
> running: it uses floating-point-based calculations to learn whether
> garbage collection is needed.  I just translated the formulas to integers,
> but there are cases when information is simply lost due to the missing
> fractional bits.
> 
> Now it is fixed (hopefully), and the allocation test now passes :-)

Excellent!  That may be a patch worth upstreaming, as there are other
supported platforms with soft-floats that would benefit from not
requiring FP as part of the standard library.  Lets separate out all these
stdlib modifications at a later stage.

-anil