> Except KSM is not as well-suited to this problem as a dynamic linker would be, since KSM doesn't have as much insight into the semantics of the pages it's ana

> Except KSM is not as well-suited to this problem as a dynamic linker would be, since KSM doesn't have as much insight into the semantics of the pages it's analyzing. Why would it need those insights? If two pages are identical, KSM de-duplicates them. The linker-assisted method would do the same, only earlier. < [...] it must apply heuristics to predict whether a page is going to get written to, whereas the dynamic linker knows exactly which sections of dynamic libs can be shared. I'm not sure which heuristics you're referring to. I think KSM de-duplicates the pages and sets the single remaining copy as copy-on-write, to detect writes (I wouldn't call this a heuristic). Both KSM and the dynamic linker would only be able to de-duplicate entire pages, since that's what the granularity the OS provides for sharing memory between processes. > Not to mention that KSM works less efficiently by recognizing duplicate pages after the fact and merging them, rather than skipping the duplication in the first place. OK, fair enough.