Reply To: IPC questions

Lots of questions!

The local and global address spaces are address spaces, not turfs. Yes, when a fork happens the parent’s local space is logically replicated (yes, COW) in the child, and the child turf gets the same rights into it that the parent turf did to its copy, but many different turfs may have rights into the respective spaces. Spaces are an aliasing notion, not a permission notion.

XOR still exists; it cheaply permits bi-directional change from local to global addressing.

It’s OS/RTS policy whether code is (COW) duplicated or is shared. Normal loaded code will likely share, but if there’s a JIT in there then you might want to duplicate it. The hardware doesn’t care.

COW involves a protection trap (not fault), fielded by the Protection Service. Whether that is part of the OS or is a detached service is up to the system design. The fork() may also elect to pre-copy things that are certain to be touched right away, like the data stack. All policy.

There are ops to global-/local-ize pointers. We expect that portals taking pointers will be called through a shim that globalizes, and the callee will verify globalization as part of argument checking. There is hardware help for that, that will be covered in a future talk.