Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 27 Apr 2003 20:57:12 -0400 (EDT) | From | Mark Grosberg <> | Subject | [RFD] Combined fork-exec syscall. |
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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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