From: noer AT cygnus DOT com (Geoffrey Noer)
Subject: Re: Process ID allocation methods
21 Mar 1998 14:26:34 -0800
Message-ID: <199803212220.OAA15188.cygnus.cygwin32.developers@rtl.cygnus.com>
References: <Eq6H3D DOT 2Fp AT bbc DOT com>
Content-Type: text
To: cgf AT bbc DOT com
Cc: cygwin32-developers AT cygnus DOT com

Christopher Faylor wrote:
[...]
> I think that either of these schemes would be hard to do.  You'd
> have to somehow instruct every running process to extend its shared
> memory to include the new table(s).
> 
> Have there been complaints about the pids wrapping too fast or have people
> been running out of pids?

People have definitely been running out of pids.  I see the occasional
"fork: no more processes" message in peoples' complaints to the list.
The main thing I don't like about wrapping so soon is that no other
Unix flavor that I know of does it this way.  I don't know enough
about pids in Unix to know whether it violates any common assumptions
people might make.  :-(

-- 
Geoffrey Noer
noer AT cygnus DOT com