Russ: | you could argue for some kind of accounting that would | ensure pages were available, but this could only be | terribly pessimistic, especially in the case of stacks | and fork.
Still, that's the way unix worked. You can deal with the pessimism by allocating lots of backing store, whereas with overcommit (at least on linux) you just have to learn to live with processes dying randomly. But you knew all that. :)
