[TALK] Proving fundamental Unix guarantees

Adam Donnison adam at saki.com.au
Mon Jun 30 16:07:14 EST 2003


This might help.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring02/cs217/lectures/memory.pdf

As it states, its always bad form to rely on supposed initial
values. It is far better to assume all memory that does not
have a value specifically allocated to it is going to be trash.

Adam

Conrad Parker wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 02:53:28PM +1000, Adam Donnison wrote:
> 
>>Wiser heads than mine may well contradict me here, however my
>>understanding is as follows.  BSS contains initialised global
>>variables, however this is done by the compiler, not the OS.
>>Other memory, allocated on either the stack or the heap, is
>>not initialised and may contain trash.
> 
> 
> no, you're thinking of the data section, bss is the bullshit section
> (the compiler simply records the size of this section in total whereas
> it must store all the initial values of the data section)
> 
> for more detail, see your compiler manual and not the BSS home page:
> http://www.sundialsoc.org.uk/
> 
> Conrad.
> 
> 
>>Adam
> 


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Adam Donnison                                  email: adam at saki.com.au
Saki Computer Services Pty. Ltd.
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