I must admit that I did think that malloc would use VM if necessary hence giving a potentially "unlimited" address space There's no distinction between "VM" an

I must admit that I did think that malloc would use VM if necessary hence giving a potentially "unlimited" address space There's no distinction between "VM" and non "VM" as far as malloc is concerned. From the perspective of the process, it's one big, flat address space. It's always "virtual", because the values of the pointers do not necessarily equal the physical layout of the memory that is directly backed by RAM.