At Sat, 28 Jul 2001 04:35:28 +0900, Sean Chittenden wrote: > > The manpage describes a nightmare of undefined and incompatible > > (across systems) behaviour. It actually describes vfork as "a spectre > > from the past"! AFAICT vfork is just an optimisation to avoid > > unnecessary copying when the child process immediately does an execve. > > Due to Linux's copy-on-write implementation the overhead is small. In > > fact, for much of Linux's history vfork was identical to fork. > > And actually, FreeBSD's copy-on-write (base for linux's COW), is > pretty optimized, so it wouldn't surprise me to hear that vfork is a > legacy beast (does research)... yup, it is! That's probably true, but NetBSD folks claim that a decently implemented vfork() still wins over fork(): http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/kernel/vfork.html -- / /__ __ Akinori.org / MUSHA.org / ) ) ) ) / FreeBSD.org / Ruby-lang.org Akinori MUSHA aka / (_ / ( (__( @ iDaemons.org / and.or.jp "Freeze this moment a little bit longer, make each impression a little bit stronger.. Experience slips away -- Time stand still"