vfork instead of fork for fork+exec?

[Martin Buchholz]

jdk7 includes subprocess I/O redirection.

I thought a lot about vfork in solaris or linux,
but never tried to use it because it's just too scary
to use in a multithreaded program.
I think there must be comments of mine in the
Sun bug database which you should be able to search.

Martin

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 23:14, Charles Oliver Nutter
<charles.nutter at sun.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> I'm trying to hack together a raw fork+exec for JRuby users that allows
> them to launch subprocesses with the same stdin/stdout, like for REPLs
> that want to launch a functional 'vim' subprocess. While trying to
> investigate some inconsistencies in using FFI to do fork+exec on Darwin,
> I came across the vfork function:
>
>      Vfork() can be used to create new processes without fully copying
> the address space of the old process,
>      which is horrendously inefficient in a paged environment.  It is
> useful when the purpose of fork(2)
>      would have been to create a new system context for an execve.
> Vfork() differs from fork in that the
>      child borrows the parent's memory and thread of control until a
> call to execve(2) or an exit (either by
>      a call to exit(2) or abnormally.)  The parent process is suspended
> while the child is using its
>      resources.
>
> I noticed this isn't used in the BSD port, which uses either fork1 or
> __sys_fork. Perhaps this would be a faster fork to use for
> process-launching?
>
> - Charlie
>
>