I was able to locate where gccgo is asking for so much memory. It’s in the libgo/go/runtime/malloc.go file in the mallocinit function:
// If we fail to allocate, try again with a smaller arena.
// This is necessary on Android L where we share a process
// with ART, which reserves virtual memory aggressively.
// In the worst case, fall back to a 0-sized initial arena,
// in the hope that subsequent reservations will succeed.
arenaSizes := [...]uintptr{
512 << 20,
256 << 20,
128 << 20,
0,
}
for _, arenaSize := range &arenaSizes {
// SysReserve treats the address we ask for, end, as a hint,
// not as an absolute requirement. If we ask for the end
// of the data segment but the operating system requires
// a little more space before we can start allocating, it will
// give out a slightly higher pointer. Except QEMU, which
// is buggy, as usual: it won't adjust the pointer upward.
// So adjust it upward a little bit ourselves: 1/4 MB to get
// away from the running binary image and then round up
// to a MB boundary.
p = round(getEnd()+(1<<18), 1<<20)
pSize = bitmapSize + spansSize + arenaSize + _PageSize
if p <= procBrk && procBrk < p+pSize {
// Move the start above the brk,
// leaving some room for future brk
// expansion.
p = round(procBrk+(1<<20), 1<<20)
}
p = uintptr(sysReserve(unsafe.Pointer(p), pSize, &reserved))
if p != 0 {
break
}
}
if p == 0 {
throw("runtime: cannot reserve arena virtual address space")
}
The interesting part is that it falls back to smaller arena sizes if larger ones fail. So limiting the virtual memory available to a go executable will actually limit how much it will successfully allocate.
I was able to use ulimit -v 327680
to limit the virtual memory to smaller numbers:
VmPeak: 300772 kB
VmSize: 300772 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmPin: 0 kB
VmHWM: 5712 kB
VmRSS: 5712 kB
VmData: 296276 kB
VmStk: 132 kB
VmExe: 2936 kB
VmLib: 0 kB
VmPTE: 56 kB
VmPMD: 0 kB
VmSwap: 0 kB
These are still big numbers, but the best that a gccgo executable can achieve. So the answer to the question is, yes you can reduce the VmData of a gccgo compiled executable, but you really shouldn’t worry about it. (On a 64 bit machine gccgo tries to allocate 512 GB.)
solved How can I reduce the virtual memory required by gccgo compiled executable?