Comment by 7jjjjjjj
1 day ago
>It feels crazy that we don't have a way to directly express the latter thing
Isn't that what posix_spawn is for?
1 day ago
>It feels crazy that we don't have a way to directly express the latter thing
Isn't that what posix_spawn is for?
posix_spawn addresses the need from userspace. Under the hood, it's still doing more or less a fork/exec, with the baggage that comes with it. A syscall would be nicer.
And how do you think posix_spawn is implemented?
This is an oft-overlooked point. An obvious place to look for improving fork+execve is to see whether posix_spawn can be given more efficient kernel mechanisms to be based upon.
And of course that has already been done. On NetBSD, posix_spawn() is a fully-fledged system call and much of the work is done in kernel mode.
* https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/posix_spawn_syscall_added
This is literally discussed in the article this post links to.
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