On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:24:08PM +0200, Jilles Tjoelker wrote: > People sometimes use system() from large address spaces where it would > improve performance greatly to use vfork() instead of fork(). > > A simple approach is to change fork() to vfork(), although I have not > tried this. It seems safe enough to use sigaction and sigprocmask system > calls in the vforked process. > > Alternatively, we can have posix_spawn() do the vfork() with signal > changes. This avoids possible whining from compilers and static > analyzers about using vfork() in system.c. However, I do not like the > tricky code for signals and that it adds lines of code. > > This is lightly tested. It is interesting to note that for some time our vfork(2) no longer stops the whole forked process (parent), only the forking thread is waiting for the child exit or exec. I am not sure is this point important for system(3), but determined code can notice the difference from the fork->vfork switch.
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