On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 04:01:37PM -0700, Coleman, Ellery wrote: > > 3- If i were able to determine that a process had died without > returning all of it's memory, does the modern unix kernel provide a > mechanism that would allow me to retrieve/recycle this wasted memory?
This can't happen for normal memory. The kernel tracks who has access to a page and allows the page to be reused once on one is accessing it. (It's actually more complicated then that in most modern VMs, but the principle holds.) It's still generally considered poor programming practice to fail to free() things you malloc(), but it's not actually necessicary to do so. Some forms of shared memory such as System V shared memory can persist after everyone is done using them is you don't clean up, but you'd know your were using one of those. -- Brooks -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529 9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
msg03174/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
