Pids

[Henry Spencer]

Several solutions to the inefficient pid-duplication-search problem exist.
A few of them were described in the Usenix newsletter a while ago.  The
simplest approach is the one Chris Torek has mentioned:  it is trivial to
change the search loop so that instead of looking for an exact match, it
looks for the lowest pid >= than the one you're trying.  Then if you don't
get an exact hit (the = part of >=), you've got a range of pids which are
known to be unused, and the search needs to be repeated only when that
range is exhausted.  This idea has been independently re-invented several
times in different places.
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