Roland Dowdeswell | 2 Feb 2009 03:04
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Re: __vfork14()

On 1233539464 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
matthew green wrote:
>

>     -- are there programs in-tree which depend on the shared address space
>        semantics?
>
>one hopes not :-)  infact, /bin/sh does not use it currently
>because of this.  see the several attempts to fix it that have
>been backed out :-)

We eventually got it right.  It is the default in /bin/sh.  It makes
simple shell scripts a lot faster if the programs executed don't do
much work, .e.g. /bin/[, /bin/echo, etc.

The code has to be conditionally compiled to know whether vfork(2) has
shared address space or COW semantics for various reasons.

--
    Roland Dowdeswell                      http://www.Imrryr.ORG/~elric/


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