Comment by magnetic
10 years ago
And it seems to me the OS should ensure the pages are zero'd out rather than user space (via malloc()) doing it, because it's still a security hole to let a process read data that it's not supposed to have access to (whether it's from another process or the kernel - it doesn't matter).
OS already zeroes out pages, obviously. But malloc doesn't usually request memory to the OS but takes a chunk from the already allocated heap.