Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 19:14:17 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: "A. Sinan Unur" <Sinan DOT Unur AT cornell DOT edu>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: more than 64Mb dpmi in win95?
In-Reply-To: <36237895.80345DBA@cornell.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.981013190820.4278t-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com


On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, A. Sinan Unur wrote:

> > I might be too dense today, but what exactly is the question?  Do you
> > wonder why Windows lets you use more than you ahve asked for?
>  
> i was under the impression that dpmi under windows was limited to 64Mb
> TOTAL so, i was just curious.

Not really; check out section 3.10 of the latest FAQ.

> after extensive experimentation, i decided leaving the cache size fixed
> was fine, because otherwise windows gobbles up all available physical
> memory pretty fast.

So what?  What good is it to have 80MB of memory if you don't let the 
OS use it?  A good setup should have most of the memory used all the 
time, otherwise it is wasted.  

DOS doesn't let you do this, since most memory-resident software there
cannot allocate and deallocate memory as needed.   But Windows releases 
memory by shrinking the cache as soon as some program requests it, so 
there's no reason to restrict it.

Anyway, you can write a trivial 10-liner which requests an amount of 
memory given on its command line and run it whenever you want that amount 
to be free up front.