Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: mergemem: announce & design issues | Date | Wed, 18 Mar 1998 09:18:30 -0800 | From | Stephen Williams <> |
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Jacques Gelinas wrote: >> The logic of mergemem is > that if you start several instance of a given program, there is a good bet > that some memory will be initialised exactly the same. So mergement is > comparing different instance of a program and find all the identical > pages. Then it puts those page read-only and merge all process to share > the same physical page. It also puts the page with the copy-on-write > flag so a process can still continue to modify the page, if needed later.
Just curious, but couldn't one load a process with the data section shared and copy-on-write the instant a program is loaded? Isn't it true that the data section can be paged out of the executable file until it is written to? (Zero-filled pages are initially shared anyhow.)
I'm a little surprised that Linux doesn't do this, or does it? And if not, would doing it get some of the benefits of mergemem without the runtime overhead? -- Steve Williams "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. steve@icarus.com But I have promises to keep, steve@picturel.com and lines to code before I sleep, http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep."
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