Re: [Valgrind-users] Errors with gcc -static

[Nicholas N. <n.n...@gm...>]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:13 PM, John Reiser<jr...@bi...> wrote:
>> Is this info specific to Linux/glibc?  AFAICT sbrk/brk
>> isn't even POSIX, which makes it even harder to determine what it
>> should do.
>
> sbrk and brk are not POSIX.  However, any system that is a derivative
> of *nix has sbrk and brk because there are too many softwares (such
> as the Bourne shell) which rely on the traditional memory map
> (.text, .data+.bss, stack) and the existence of sbrk/brk.

AFAICT on Mac OS X the syscall brk() does not exist.  The library
function sbrk() does, and it's implemented using the mach trap
vm_allocate() which does initialise memory.  (I'm not making any kind
of argument here, I just thought you'd be interested to hear this.)

Nick