Comment by wbl

7 years ago

There are things that don't fit the posix_spawn limitations, especially with fd or capability manipulation.

Yes, certainly. The paper covers many of those limitations.

The goal is not "remove", but "seek to remove". The relevant definition of "seek" here is "to make an attempt" says https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seek .

How many of those 1304 Ubuntu packages require fork()? Are there benefits to replacing (say) 1283 of them with posix_spawn()?

  • Yes, there are benefits to using posix_spawn: It's faster. See Figure 1.

    • How many of those packages would be improved with a faster spawn mechanism? Who is going to investigate each one? How will they convince upstream to change well-tested code?