I'm guessing that a big part of the problem with moving away from fork() in general is that each new process needs a copy of the parent process' environment anyway, right?

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zerobees 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The LWN article is incorrect in saying that it "must copy the entire process state (including memory) for the child process". There are some kernel structures and page tables that need to be initialized, plus you need a new stack, but it's not nearly as dramatic as implied. Most of the parent's memory is "incorporated by reference", so to speak.

In fact, if you profile it, in the fork() + execve() model, execve() is far more expensive, because not only does it replace the old process with a new one, but it also involves running the dynamic linker, which opens, parses, and mmaps library files.

It still makes sense to get rid of the fork() overhead if you're going to throw away the cloned process state soon thereafter, but if you wanted to make process execution radically faster, rethinking the exec architecture would probably offer more significant gains.

	▲	corbet an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The kernel does not copy every page, but it does have to copy all of the VMAs. Setting memory to COW (which can involve changing a lot of page-table-entries) is not free either. I guess I could have mentioned copy-on-write explicitly, but I do not believe that what I wrote was incorrect.
	▲	nasretdinov an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Fork becomes more and more expensive the higher the RSS of the process, roughly 1ms per 1Gb of the process size with 4kb pages. Given that modern servers can easily support 1-2Tb of RAM the fork() part can easily take several hundred milliseconds, blocking everything in the meantime. So for larger programs you kinda have to have a "fork helper" process if you need to execute external programs for some reason.

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dijit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a bit naive, but I don't think that's necessarily a requirement.

It might be commonly held convention, and thus, an assumption, in Linux (and, broadly, UNIX) but I don't think it's true inside VAX or even Windows, so I don't think it's a requirement.

Unless I've missed something (which is totally possible, this is not an area of OS design I've spent much time).

	▲	lanstin an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But also UID, groups, controlling TTY, process group, capabilities, pipes, shared memory, etc. and the file descriptors while maybe not inherently needed are how a lot of Unix plumbing works.
	▲	sjmulder an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even DOS has environment inheritance!

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sanderjd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of times you actively don't want the parent environment or any of the memory or file descriptors. And then you have to actively do work to fix all that stuff up after the fork.

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lokar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the environment is not that big