From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 08:48:19 +0000 From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <46DDB9AD.DF4673BE@null.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: , <25aab6ef0bbc286f09ce55dd10af0979@terzarima.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] plan 9 overcommits memory? Topicbox-Message-UUID: b7ddcc90-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Charles Forsyth wrote: > you'll need to ensure that each fork reserves as many physical pages as are currently > shared in the data space, for the life of the shared data, > so that every subsequent copy-on-write is guaranteed to succeed. > this will prevent some large processes from forking to exec much smaller images. That's why many OSes have a "spawn" primitive that combines fork-and-exec.