I'll take this up with FreeBSD folk, but I'm open to ideas as to how best to deal with the problem in the context of the test suite pending resolution by FreeBSD.
Not sure what the test purpose is: if it is to test that you get a MemoryError in cases where you ask for more than Python could represent, and the test errs on system where the requested size is actually representable, the solution then is to fix the test case. If the test purpose is to trigger a memory error for cases when the system runs out of memory, the test case should set a ulimit to less than the physical memory. It might be useful to have an interpreter-maintained limit on the amount of memory Python can consume, but such a feature is clearly out of scope for the current state of the code. Regards, Martin