why not posix_spawn()?

Posted Nov 6, 2009 22:55 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: why not posix_spawn()? by mikov
Parent article: Toward a smarter OOM killer

> Any good reasons why vfork() should be avoided?

The manual page installed on my system says that copy-on-write makes vfork unecessary. It concludes with "it is rather unfortunate that Linux revived this specter from the past." :)

However... it seems like the results you've posted show quite a substantial performance gain for vfork + exec as opposed to fork + exec, for processes with large heaps.

Maybe the "preferred" way to do this on Linux would be using clone(2)??