[Interest] memory fragmentation?

[Graeme Gill]

Lukas Geyer wrote:
> The address space is expanded immediately but physical memory pages are 
> assigned at the moment the memory is accessed; either never, always or 
> at kernels discretion, depending on the implemented overcommit strategy [1].

Right, but malloc will return NULL if the address space is not available.
This is less likely on a 64 bit system, but quite possible on a 32 bit system.
Whether you can actually use that memory is a different question,
but it's certain that you can't use it if the address is NULL!

Graeme Gill.