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  • Wikipedia is right in this case, just more high level. Commented Dec 11, 2012 at 13:10
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    Yes, copy-on-write is lazy copying, child process copy the page when try to write it. So basically, after a fork, almost child's memory is shared with parent. However, before any of the processes made, every child process still have some private memory, modified from parent's or new allocating. That means even without any action the forked child process has some private memory. We can verify it with pmap -XX PID or cat /proc/PID/smap. Commented Feb 29, 2016 at 1:45
  • Regarding - "The original page gets marked writable afterwards.", who will own it? Here the other process who has not tried writing it? Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 11:10
  • This is lovely. Let's start teaching this in kindergartens Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 11:59