https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-fork-in-the-road/ … this paper really has everything I love about operating systems: history, memory management, and a resigned sigh that we are stuck with designs from the 70s due to backwards compatibility
Interesting paper. I just wish there were a good, decently portable and reliable alternative to have cooperating processes with *some* address space mapped to the same address. But trying to make that work, especially with ASLR etc, is really hard.
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They mention that "Notably, major applicationsthat fork (e.g., Apache, Chrome, PostgreSQL) have Windows ports that don’t, so fork is clearly not essential" - but it's a MAJOR PITA for PG to get shared memory mapped at the same address (important for performance / easy of coding).
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Totally not worth the added complexity (wish postgres were using threads, and several people are talking about changing that), but it sems useful from an MM scalability perspective to be able allocations that hit the OS in individual connections without a shared address space.
End of conversation
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