Subject: Question about text segments and NetBSD and Solaris 2
To: None <tech-kern@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Brian Buhrow <buhrow@cats.ucsc.edu>
List: tech-kern
Date: 07/25/1997 10:28:38
Hello NetBSD gurus. This question is slightly relevant to NetBSD, but
I thought I would ask it anyway, as I'm interested in the answer for NetBSD
as well as for SunOS 4.x and 5.x.
The question is: If an executable is linked statically, if multiple
instances are running, are there multiple instances of the text segment for
that executable in memory at once? In other words, is the OS smart enough
to know that multiple instances of a given executable can share their text
segments even if those text segments don't rely on shared objects?
What we really want to know is if we're running 5 instances of a
program which takes 5 MB in text space alone, are we going to consume 25MB
of memory, or 5MB of memory with that text space.
If people know the anser for various OS's, including: SunOS 4.x and
5.x, Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, etc. I'd be most appreciative.
-Brian