Re:In defence of swap: common misconceptions
by wtallis on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:17AM
(#23464472)
I think he's suggesting that the fork itself should fail if the subsequent overwrite pass to defeat CoW would cause problems. So you would have trouble actually directly using all of your RAM if you had some processes that don't follow a fork with an exec—but that leftover physical RAM should still be able to be used for the disk cache.
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Re:In defence of swap: common misconceptions
by duskwuff on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:53AM
(#23464657)
> I think he's suggesting that the fork itself should fail if the subsequent overwrite pass to defeat CoW would cause problems.
That'd put you in the unusual position of forbidding any sufficiently large process from ever creating children. The kernel has no way of knowing whether a fork() will be followed by exec().