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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Free Software Foundation (was: Re: Mach, the new standard?)
Message-ID: <8667@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Sep-87 20:53:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8667
Posted: Mon Sep 28 20:53:07 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Sep-87 20:53:07 EDT
References: <1665@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <8381@utzoo.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 12

> The fork call is going to be awefully expensive, as a copy of the
> entire data space of the parent will be made...

Nonsense, not on a sensibly implemented system (4BSD as shipped from
Berkeley does not count, although in fairness I should say that this one
is not entirely their fault -- hardware bugs got in their way).  It just
has to *look* like a copy is made.  Any half-decent virtual-memory system
will do this with copy-on-write, so the bulk of the data never gets copied
and the fork is cheap.
-- 
"There's a lot more to do in space   |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry