[comp.lang.smalltalk] Is there a memory management bug in the fx,ci, and si ROM ?

warner@scubed.com (Ken Warner) (01/10/91)

    In article <11678@goofy.Apple.COM> lsr@Apple.com (Larry Rosenstein) writes:
    >In article <127472@linus.mitre.org>, dsb@mbunix.mitre.org (Blodgett) writes:
    >> 	Question: I have heard that there is a bug in the Mac ROMs in the
    >> 	fx, ci, [etc]
    >[etc.]  The actual bug involves moving memory blocks around when trying
    >to make room for a non-relocatable block.  The bug is that a hint telling
    >the Memory Manager where to start scanning the heap is wrong, and the
    >Memory Manager ends up scanning the entire heap unnecessarily.
    >The bug is only supposed to affect applications that allocate a lot of
    >non-relocatable blocks, which means it doesn't show up in the majority of
    >applications.  There is a fix being worked on.

Is Smalltalk-80 and/or Objectworks 4.0 such a program that allocates a lot of
non-relocatable blocks?  

Ken Warner

ags@scs.carleton.ca (Alexander George Morison Smith) (01/12/91)

If there is a bug that slows down memory management on the Mac, it won't
affect ParcPlace all that much (in my opinion).  From what I can tell,
PP Smalltalk just allocates a huge hunk of memory to itself on startup
and then does its own Smalltalk memory management inside that hunk
(garbage collection, object allocation etc aren't standard Macintosh
memory operations). 

- Alex