Followup to: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0002231144550.3922-100000@velius.chaos2.org>
By author: Jacob Luna Lundberg <jacob@velius.chaos2.org>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> >
> > Huh? "ps" is capable of sorting by starting time, which is a much
> > better idea than relying on the pids behaving *any* particular way.
>
> But if someone has obtained root, the system clock is not necessarily
> trustworthy anymore. ;-)
>
> I would say if we want this functionality, it would be useful to be
> able to set the "minimum pid" via proc or devfs. Of course, I'm not sure
> that wouldn't be kernel bloat.
>
Okay, someone just pointed out that the reason for this is a
performance heuristic: the first few hundred PIDs tend to be clogged
with longrunning processes, so the PID space is very dense in that
range. Thus, skipping over this range is faster than trying to fill
it, and it's not worth worrying about potentially losing 1% of the PID
space.
I buy this argument :)
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 23 2000 - 21:00:34 EST