Re: How does "fork()" work?

[Thornton Prime <thornton yoyoweb com>]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Living Dead wrote:

> To put it in another way:
> If I allocate 32Mb of memory in the parent process,
> then I call fork(), the amount of memory needed for
> both parent and child is 64Mb?

The way Linux works, no, each child doesn't make a full copy in memory.

Linux uses a copy-on-write method, so once the parent or the child
"dirty" a page in memory, the page (and only that page) is duplicated.

thornton