Errata

It looks like I was mistaken about something. It's indeed true that reservations must begin on a multiple of 64 KB. I assumed this also meant that they also had to end on a 64 KB boundary. From Programming Applications for Windows (what I just looked it up in):

Whenever you reserve a region of address space, the system ensures that the region begins on an allocation granularity boundary. The allocation granularity can vary from one CPU platform to another. However, as of this writing, all the CPU platforms (x86, 32-bit Alpha, 64-bit Alpha, and IA-64) use the same allocation granularity of 64 KB.

When you reserve a region of address space, the system ensures that the size of the region is a multiple of the system's page size. A page is a unit of memory that the system uses in managing memory. Like the allocation granularity, the page size can vary from one CPU to another. The x86 uses a 4-KB page size, whereas the Alpha (when running both 32-bit Windows 2000 and 64-bit Windows 2000) uses an 8-KB page size. At the time of this writing, Microsoft expects the IA-64 to also use an 8-KB page size. However, Microsoft might switch to a larger page size (16 KB or higher) if testing indicates better overall system performance.

So it seems the mystery of the 8 KB reserved region wasn't really a mystery at all.

As for Hoard, after I reported the issue on the mailing list, the author acknowledged the existence of the flaw earlier today. At the time I was doing the debugging, I guessed (and I still believe) that he's a Unix guy, and so wasn't aware of the quirky way Windows handles allocating memory (that is, the 64 KB allocation granularity). Hopefully he'll fix it pretty soon, because Gord knows I'm too lazy to do it :P