fork v vfork (was Re: Mac OS X: Rebuild Require after Security Update 2002-11-21)

[Steven Tamm <steventamm@mac.com>]

I reported a bug with my test case.  It's not that big a deal, I just 
wanted to make sure that something was being done about it.  It's a 
fairly nasty bug if it hangs the system.  It would also make the 
compile a little cleaner.

WRT fork vs. vfork; on darwin the figures I've seen show a difference 
in performance about 100x, and has been getting worse in each release.

What are people's feelings about conditionalizing the three calls to 
vfork (in process.c, callproc.c, and sysdep.c) so that it could become 
fork() on platforms that don't have a working VFORK.  It would probably 
use the HAVE_VFORK conditional.

-Steven

On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 09:29  AM, Andrew Choi wrote:

> Steven Tamm <steventamm@mac.com> writes:
>
>> [...]  So I think the problem may be with vfork not correctly cleaning
>> up after itself if the process goes kablooy.  Andrew, did you report a
>> radar issue associated with this?
>
> Hi Steven,
>
> No.  The problem and fix were submitted by Nozomu Ando on
> emacs-pretest-bug a while ago.  I thought it was acceptable to just use
> fork so I left it at that.  I have not received reports of other
> problems related to this one.
>
> Would you like me to write a bug report to the darwin lists?  Seems 
> like
> they know about the problem with vfork but perhaps we can remind them.
>
> Andrew.
>