Re: [RFD] Combined fork-exec syscall.

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

If you do this, _please_ make it compat with NT.

On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 08:57:12PM -0400, Mark Grosberg wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> 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?
> 
> I would think on large, multi-user systems that are spawning processes all
> day, this might improve performance if the shells on such a system were
> patched.
> 
> Perhaps a system call like:
> 
>    pid_t spawn(const char *p_path,
>                const char *argv[],
>                const char *envp[],
>                const int   filp[]);
> 
> The filp array would allow file descriptors to be redirected. It could be
> terminated by a -1 and reference the file descriptors of the current
> process (this could also potentially save some dup() syscalls).
> 
> If any of these parameters (exclusing p_path) are NULL, then the
> appropriate values are taken from the current process.
> 
> I originally was thinking of a name of fexec() for such a syscall, but
> since there are already "f" variant syscalls (fchmod, fstat, ...) that an
> fexec() would make more sense about executing an already open file, so the
> name spawn() came to mind.
> 
> 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.
> 
> L8r,
> Mark G.
> 
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-- 
---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm