Re: fork: out of memory

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Sat, 29 Nov 1997 18:57:01 +0000 (GMT)


> It's probably very much worth it. You really have two situations to
> consider. Small memory machines and large memory machines. On small memory
> machines this structure would shrink to a smaller size and have less impact.

Well the cost will be probably be 3bytes/page on a 32bit machine (the lowest
12 bits are fixed on a 4K page machine, lowest 13 on 8K etc). That means
you've actually got room for at least 4 flag bits.

(Multiply by 3 may seem worse than shift left 2 but you dont hit the table
that often and its actually a shift and add.)