whay can't processes shrink as well as grow?

[Dmitry V. Volodin]

In article <PCG.90Oct10212600 at odin.cs.aber.ac.uk> pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
>Now there is a catch: even if your storage reclaimer detectes that a
>block of memory just under the break has become free, and lowers the
>break as a result, in many UNIX kernels this regrettably will not
>release any pages to the kernel mmeory pool -- in some it will not even
>invalidate page table entries beyond the break. This is probably because

More of that - in some paging evnvironments brk() is a dummy! When
the process addresses memory beyond the brk level the kernel just adds
another one page to porcess's memory pool.

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Dmitry V. Volodin <dvv at hq.demos.su>     |
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