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Ubuntu on Windows

(blog.dustinkirkland.com)
2049 points bpierre | 1 comments | 30 Mar 16 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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tobias3 ◴[30 Mar 16 17:33 UTC] No.11391193[source]▶
I wonder if they implemented a copy-on-write fork syscall in NT. Otherwise it will be slower (and use a lot more memory) in some scenarios.

Edit: And cow fork only makes sense if there is memory over-commit. So to be fully featured it would need a separate memory subsystem with memory over-commit.

replies(2): >>11391556 #>>11391688 #
1. quotemstr ◴[30 Mar 16 18:06 UTC] No.11391556[source]▶
No, you don't need overcommit for COW fork. You can fully commit the writable pages of the new process. Yes, that uses a bit of pagefile space, but disk space is cheap, and this approach works fine. You can (and should, if you care about robustness) turn off overcommit on Linux too.