Re: [RFD] Combined fork-exec syscall.

[Rafael Costa dos Santos <rsantos@terenet.com.br>]

Do you have some work done on this issue ?


4/27/03 9:57:12 PM, Mark Grosberg <mark@nolab.conman.org> 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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