Multiprocessing, shared memory vs. pickled copies

[sturlamolden]

On 8 apr, 02:03, sturlamolden <sturlamol... at yahoo.no> wrote:

> http://folk.uio.no/sturlamo/python/sharedmem-feb13-2009.zip
> Known issues/bugs: 64-bit support is lacking, and os._exit in
> multiprocessing causes a memory leak on Linux.

I should probably fix it for 64-bit now. Just recompiliong with 64-bit
integers will not work, because I intentionally hardcoded the higher
32 bits to 0. It doesn't help to represent the lower 32 bits with a 64
bit integer (which it seems someone actually have tried :-D) The
memory leak on Linux is pesky. os._exit prevents clean-up code from
executing, but unlike Windows the Linux kernel does no reference
counting. I am worried we actually need to make a small kernel driver
to make this work properly for Linux, since os._exit makes the current
user-space reference counting fail on child process exit.


Sturla