A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings.
The patches being worked on by Oracle engineers introduce a new in-memory file-system (MSHAREFS) and allow for optionally sharing page table entries between processes. With certain classes of workloads, this can mean very significant memory savings – huge savings in fact as noted in the patch cover letter after Oracle realized this memory overhead in actual use on a database server.
Improvements are never a bad thing, but this strikes me as a “Oracle fixing a uniquely-Oracle problem” kind of situation.
I’m not an expert in databases, so I can’t say if this is standard practice, but sharing a page table entry across 1000+ processes seems a bit… excessive.
It seems like a good way to introduce a security vulnerability too.