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KSM is a linux driver that allows dynamicly sharing identical memory pages
between one or more processes.

Unlike tradtional page sharing that is made at the allocation of the
memory, ksm do it dynamicly after the memory was created.  Memory is
periodically scanned; identical pages are identified and merged.

The sharing is made in a transparent way to the processes that use it.

Ksm is highly important for hypervisors (kvm), where in production
enviorments there might be many copys of the same data data among the host
memory.  This kind of data can be: similar kernels, librarys, cache, and
so on.

Even that ksm was wrote for kvm, any userspace application that want to
use it to share its data can try it.

Ksm may be useful for any application that might have similar (page
aligment) data strctures among the memory, ksm will find this data merge
it to one copy, and even if it will be changed and thereforew copy on
writed, ksm will merge it again as soon as it will ...