calloc()

Posted Aug 11, 2005 22:17 UTC (Thu) by brettlevin (guest, #29117)
In reply to: calloc() by brettlevin
Parent article: kzalloc()

I found a libc guru to ask.

In 4.1BSD the args to malloc and calloc were unsigned ints. There were at least some machines who had 16-bit ints, but which had more than 2^16 worth of addressable memory. In such an environment it might be useful to allocate more than 64Kb in one call.

Then POSIX changed these args to size_t, easing the size restriction.