On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 12:37:30PM -0800, Rahul Kulkarni wrote:
>
> The application which I'm looking at not only needs a
> shared a fixed space, it has a big chunk of private
> data. Every child process is a seperate logical entity
> and is orthognal to the parent and other child
> processes. So, almost all the data pages in individual
> children will diverge from the parent and other
> children and will be COW..and this duplication or
> excess baggage will not suffice and hence the need to
> exec(). 

There is still clearly some confusion here.  Earlier you said
text, now you're saying data.  Not that it really makes any
difference; as far as I can tell I haven't heard anything yet
that suggests that calling exec(2) somehow makes any more
efficient use of resources.

> Also, the application has to be split into individual
> logical entities to support runtime upgrades to
> individual programs rather than one monolith program..

That's pretty easy to do using shared objects with well-defined
interfaces.

Thor