Re: old patch from mandrake for capping of memory with physmem calls

[Paul Eggert]

Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> writes:

> find attached a pretty old patch from Mandrake that they are still using ... 
> what do you guys think ?  good idea/bad idea ?

That patch causes physmem_total to underestimate the amount of
available physical memory on linux-gnu, sunos5, cygwin, and irix6 (but
not on other platforms!), by capping it to 1/16 of the address space.
But this will cause "sort -S 10%" to not conform to the documentation,
as it would use of 1/160 of the address space, not 1/10 of physical
memory, when the latter exceeds the former.

I suspect the patch is obsolete, as 'sort' has added several sanity
checks along these lines over the years.  If we knew exactly what the
original problem was, I could be more definite about this.