as memory use for large bss arrays

[Andi Kleen]

I made a mistake last night where I accidentially created an (uninitialized)
global array in C that was several hundred TB large.  gcc didn't have much
trouble with it, but gas seemed to try to put it all into memory. 

I managed to kill it while it was already grown to 3GB while
the machine was already swapping heavily. 

Is there a specific reason as has to keep such large bss arrays in 
memory?

GNU assembler 2.17.50.0.5 20060927 (SUSE Linux) on x86-64 linux.

-Andi