Re: [COFF] [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

On 06/07/2021, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: I've never been a fan of clone(). It always strikes me as something that seems like an elegant simplification at first, but the practical realization (on Linux that is) requires several rather ugly library-level hacks to make it work right for typical use cases. UX/RT will use the "processes are containers for threads" model rather than rfork()/clone() since that's the model the seL4 kernel basically uses (in a very generalized form with address spaces , capability spaces, and threads being separate objects and each thread being associated with a capability space and address space), and it would also be slightly easier to create the helper threads that will be required in certain parts of the IPC transport layer. The base process creation primitive (efork(), for "empty/eviscerated fork") will create a completely blank non-runnable child process with no memory mappings or file descriptors, and return a context FD that the parent can use to manipulate the state of the child with normal APIs, including copying FDs and memory mappings. To actually start the child the parent will perform an exec*() within the child context (either a regular exec*() to make the child run a different program, or a new eexec() function that takes an entry point rather than a command line to run the process with whatever memory mappings were set up), after which point the parent will no longer be able to manipulate the child's state. This will eliminate the overhead of fork() for spawning processes running other programs, but will still allow for a library-level fork() implementation that has comparable overhead to traditional implementations. Also, it will do what Plan 9 never did and make the process/memory APIs file-oriented (I still don't get why Plan 9 went with a rather limited anonymous memory API rather than using memory-mapped files for everything). Also, we're straying a bit from historical Unix here and should have probably moved to COFF several messages ago.