It occurs to me however, that perhaps the kernel would receive a page
fault everytime such a zero value assignment might occur, and further,
the kernel might not be aware of the value that is going to be put into
the page. The former might be a severe performance penalty (is it?) and
the latter would forbid this from happening.
The reason a user level solution might not be implemented is that someone
is using published libraries of some type, and may not wish to change how
they work (particularly if they are FORTRAN based, which is often where the
huge memory hogging stuff comes from).
So, I would like to know if it is technically feasible to detect whether
the kernel needs to assign a page or not depending on whether the value
to be stored is zero or not, and what kind of performance penalty there
might be, if any.
-- William Burrow -- Fredericton Area Network, New Brunswick, Canada Copyright 1997 William Burrow This line left intentionally blank. And the one below it.