Re: Sort-of Announce: Gnet, a network library

[David Helder <dhelder umich edu>]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2000 allbery@ece.cmu.edu wrote:
> On  6 Jan, Mike Palczewski wrote:
> | David Helder wrote:
> | >        vfork()  differs from fork in that the parent is suspended
> | >        until the child makes a call  to  execve(2)  or  _exit(2).
> | >        The child shares all memory with its parent, including the
> | >        stack, until execve() is issued by the child.   The  child
> | >        must  not return from the current function or call exit(),
> | >        but may call _exit().
> | 
> | I must be using a diffrent man page.
> | 
> |        Under  Linux,  fork  is  implemented  using  copy-on-write
> |        pages,  so  the  only penalty incurred by fork is the time
> |        and memory required to duplicate the parent's page tables,
> |        and to create a unique task structure for the child.
> | 
> |         Under Linux, vfork is merely an alias for fork."
> 
> You're using a different man page.  Moreover, in the most recent Linux
> kernels, vfork() is now essentially the BSD vfork() (as described by
> David's manpage clipping) and not merely an alias for fork().

Hmmm... my man pages says both of those things.  My concern would be that
using vfork on other systems would do as my quote describes, even though
in Linux it does as your quote describes.

David

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