[btilly]

You jut repeated the parent's point while thinking you disagreed with it.

The point was that after you fork() in a copy-on-write scheme, the OS now has promised that more memory is available to write on than may actually exist. If the OS avoided overallocating, it would have to right there and then reserve lots of memory (without necessarily writing to it) just to be sure that you wouldn't run out at a later date.

[markps]

You're correct. I do agree with the point, but I misinterpreted where he was going with that example.