random ramblings

Many of the reasons why I do security now and don't write Common Lisp programs anymore are related to the ideas in this article of the register on IE bugs. The tree does bother me, and if people ask me to write software that I consider to be a nuisance, either in security or in unneeded complexity, I will protest. Sometimes I had to give in, but every day I could see the tree growing and the bother increased.
Now I not only do security, but am also a consultant, so the tree is pointed out and removal plans are presented. If the client does not want the tree removed I move on and tend to forget about the tree soon.
Related, our holiday destination is starting to look like a warzone. Do they sell bullet-proof vests for 3 year olds?

lazy allocating sbcl

Compare:

$ ps -p 19100  -o pid,pmem,rss,size,sz,vsz,args

  PID %MEM   RSS    SZ    SZ    VSZ COMMAND

19100  0.9  9988  6772  8758  35032 ./src/runtime/sbcl --core output/sbcl.core --userinit /dev/null

with

$  ps -p 19114 -o pid,pmem,rss,size,sz,vsz,args

  PID %MEM   RSS    SZ    SZ    VSZ COMMAND

19114  0.9  9732 859548 221711 886844 sbcl --userinit /dev/null

I patched sbcl to allocate all memory only when it actually needs to use it, not at startup. The resident size is the same, but the virtual size is quite smaller. The patches are quite ugly, but the resulting sbcl seems to survive the test-suite without problems.

I do think there is a need to add thread awareness to the patches and if someone ports this back to cmucl I can close bug 282716.

Expect an email tonight :-).

//apparent success (reached end of run-tests.sh normally)

Joy!



(edited slighly. Oh it is "Van Eynde, Peter")