Warp wrote:
>   In a typical modern OS there may be hundreds of processes running even
> if the system has just booted up and the user has not started any program
> of his own. There are all kinds of drivers, services, task managers,
> window managers, firewalls... you name it. Every single one of them uses
> the same system libraries (eg. typically libc plus a few others in linux).

I understand that. How much of libc is actually used in common by a 
majority of those programs? What sorts of things do you think are in 
libc that's used by all the programs, other than (let's see) I/O and 
perhaps the floating point stuff (which probably isn't used by too many 
device drivers, task managers, or firewalls :-).

In any case, like I said, there are possibilities in that system that 
you could have libraries like that available at certain shared physical 
addresses if you wanted, or being set up as services in their own 
process, for large discrete-functionality packages. Indeed, this is just 
exactly how the kernel itself is set up.  They just don't do it for 
other packages, yet, as far as I know.

>   Just because the user has not started any program doesn't mean there
> isn't a big bunch of programs running.

Yes. And far more in Singularity, because all those things actually are 
separate processes.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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