On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 05:38:04PM -0400, ron minnich wrote:
Joe, we have visited this type of issue from time to time. The heap size, if it is related to a mainboard (and it is) belongs in the mainboard Kconfig and should not be user-visible. The reason is that if it is visible then that visibility implies that it can be safely changed, much as the baud rate can be safely changed. That is clearly wrong: many values of heap size will result in a locked up platform.
Hi Ron, Thanks for the update. I haven't had any problems increasing heap size but that could just be my motherboard.
It's easy to run out of RAM if you increase it too much, especially if the stack gets too large. For most boards, stack*processors + heap + code = 1M.
The bigger worry is that someone will decrease the RAM size, which is a boot-time failure. Build-time failures are easier to handle.
Thanks, Myles