At 3:02 PM -0400 4/28/01, jack wrote:
hi,
i posted here a while back and had no success with the tips people gave me, so i am trying again.
Morning all. I traded a few notes with Jack about this in the last 24 hours. Beyond finding out he has an icelandic keyboard on the powerbook, Jack discovered that if he changed the default minimum size in the Get Info for memory size from 1000K to a much larger number then Squeak WILL run!
Now I suspect but he's not confirmed yet is that he doesn't have a lot of memory around (VM or real) or it's very fragmented, and the macintosh OS will look at the minimum size and slot him into a 1000K. Now the problem is that 1000K IS enough memory to start the VM startup code running. BUT it runs out of memory when it attempts to read the first 4 bytes of the image to figure out if the 6502 magic number is there. A few statements later it would of course attempt to allocate the chunk of memory for oldspace/newspace and fail with an out of memory error, so the error he is getting is related to memory but bogus. So in the next revision I'll change the minimum value to a larger number say 1500K which should startup the VM and get you to the point of failure for out of memory.
Of course if you have lots of memory around then the finder just gives you 20MB, which is why others couldn't recreate the problem.
Note for carbon users using the special Carbonized macintosh VM. The memory allocation pattern is very different. The carbon VM running under OS-9 will allocate memory upto the memory partition. Then backoff the allocation based on how much memory is free, then reallocate based on needs. So if you allocate say 40MB then you might find only 17.4MB is actually used.
The carbon application under OS-X will allocate a 1GB footprint, then back off, so you will find greater than 1GB mapped for VM storage, but say 17.5MB in use as the working set size. It will grow based on need but if you exceed the number of pages that can be stored in real memory then you get to discover how fast your paging device is. It won't crash, but it becomes very glacial in behavior.
Lastly
Hint. One needs access and a pointer to the V3.sources file. It's not obvious from the FTP site that a new user needs this too. Jack's last comment to me was he gets the error that the sources file can't be found.