Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 09:51:43 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Patrick Steele <psteele AT garnet DOT msen DOT com>
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: coreleft() in DJGPP?


On 21 Sep 1995, Patrick Steele wrote:

> I'm porting an app from Borland C++ 4.5 and need to check for how much
> memory is left (I don't want to fall below a certain limit).  BC had
> a "coreleft()" function which would let me know how much memory is
> free.  Is there a comparable function in DJGPP?

Not really.  You can use some of the following functions (declared on 
<dpmi.h> and documented in the libcref.i Info file):

    int _go32_dpmi_get_free_memory_information(_go32_dpmi_meminfo *info);
    u_long _go32_dpmi_remaining_physical_memory(void);
    u_long _go32_dpmi_remaining_virtual_memory(void);

However, these don't report on memory which is free in the memory pool 
used by malloc(), only the memory which wasn't requested from the system 
by brk()/sbrk(), so they don't really tell you how much free memory do 
you have.  Personally, I don't think this to be too much of an omission, 
for two reasons:

	1) Different extended memory providers (XMS, VCPI, DPMI) have 
their peculiar bugs/features when you ask for memory, so it's next to 
impossible to tell exactly how much memory can you ask before you get 
NULL from malloc().  (For example, under some versions of Windows and 
QDPMI you can never allocate more than half of available memory in a 
single chunk.)

	2) When you have virtual memory, you should generally worry much 
less about how much do you have.  Isn't this what virtual memory is all 
about?  If you care about the physical memory (for performance reasons), 
then you can test the available physical memory at the program start-up, 
with one of the functions mentioned above.