New Patch Fixes 43 Flaws In OS X, Many Serious 2168
snip- explanation of fork()'s error reporting issue
I do not know who you are quoting below.
Snit i did, and the valid criticism is about the point i had above about signing statements...
This seems to be someone who has internalized the way Unix works that he does not think of the alternatives. It's all to easy to get so used to something like fork() that you don't think about what it would be like if no such API existed.
But on Windows, CreateProceslove() either makes a new process or fails. In those places where it uses Copy-on-Write, it reserves the swap space in advance, or fails if it can't.
fork() could do this, but because fork() uses copy-on-write for *the whole process*, this would burn absurd amounts of swap space; therefore this is not done.
Therefore it is possible for the copy-on-write to fail because it can't allocate any more swap.
He seems to differ from me in that he does not blame fork, but rather the later memory-access, for the fault.
I think this view mistaken; the design of 'fork' is the root cause of this problem. There is no way to do memory access that can eliminate it.