Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Thomas_E_Zerucha
From: Thomas_E_Zerucha@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Another great quote from Mr. Good
Message-ID: <8090@cup.portal.com>
Date: 14 Aug 88 01:27:57 GMT
References: <1116@atari.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 18
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3273

If I understand right, there are actually two problems with Malloc violations.
1. Some people do a Malloc and use memory outside of the Malloc'ed range.
2. Some people expect successive Mallocs to return sequential addresses.
#2 is not true even now if your memory gets at all fragemented.  If the
40 folder bug is fixed, the OSPool should be large enough to hold Malloc
Handles, especially if it returns memory into the OSpool correctly.
Alternately, (since I hope no one is expecting to use beyond what a Malloc
(-1) would return) you could put the headers at the very bottom of the largest
Mallocable segment and that might fix the problems and retain compatibility.
I hope you can now MFree in a different order than Mallocing and have it
work properly (this shouldn't be a problem to fix).
Considering I use RTX often, perhaps the 64 bytes extra may be enough of
a buffer to solve #1.
    Perhaps you should try to do some of these fixes and see if your
compatibility percentage improves.  And list what breaks.  If you get to
98% or more, then perhaps it would be better to go to the fixed Malloc
(with the aforementioned compatibility patches).  I seem to remember that
the Mega roms broke a few things.