On Sun, 2006-Jun-18 13:39:03 -0700, R. B. Riddick wrote: Instead of >zero'ing pages immediately after the process does not need them >anymore, it would be much better, to keep the system safe >(especially: security relevant software patches; and (even more) >physical safety)
The Unix model provides security as long as you don't bypass the access controls by (eg) reading /dev/mem. The OS only needs to explicitly zero a page if it is handing it back to a process without otherwise initialising it. There's no need to zero a page if it's going to be used to satisfy a pagein request. FreeBSD tries to reduce the effective overhead of page zeroing by zeroing them in the idle loop and keeping a cache of pre-zeroed pages for handing out to processes. -- Peter Jeremy
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