Re: [RFD] Combined fork-exec syscall.

[Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2003, Mark Grosberg wrote:

> Is there any interest in a single system call that will perform both a
> fork() and exec()? Could this save some extra work of doing a
> copy_mm(), copy_signals(), etc?

How about doing vfork() right (fixing the "what if execve(2) fails"
race) instead?

> I know almost all of my fork()-exec() code does almost the same thing. I
> guess vfork() was a potential solution, but this somehow seems cleaner
> (and still may be more efficient than having to issue two syscalls)...
> the downside is, of course, another syscall.

Which is a major showstopper, because it'd only be useful to
non-portable, Unix-specific applications (thus it wouldn't be put to
much use). OTOH, copy-on-write pages will eliminate much of the overhead
already.