[Devel] Re: [PATCH 11/11][v15]: Document sys_eclone

[Albert Cahalan]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 12:10 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> On 07/04/2010 04:39 PM, Matt Helsley wrote:
>>>
>>> 1. can you implement it for i386 (register starved) using eclone?
>>
>> That's a very good question. I'm going to punt on a direct answer for
>> now. Instead,  I wonder if it's even worth enabling vfork through eclone.
>> vfork is rarely used, is supported by the "old" clone syscall, and any
>> old code adapted to use eclone for vfork would need significant
>> changes because of vfork's specialness. (A consequence of the way vfork
>> borrows page tables and must avoid clobbering parent's registers..)
>
> vfork is its own system call for a reason.  We used to do it with
> sys_clone, and it turned out to be a mess.  Doing it in a separate
> system call -- even though the internals are largely the same -- is cleaner.

That's interesting; only ia64 and xtensa still do vfork via clone.
I remember sys_vfork being purely i386.

I guess we need an evfork then. We're slowly gaining all sorts
of functionality (various clone flags) that is inaccessible when
there is a need for vfork behavior.

To greatly reduce the mess, I strongly suggest that it have the
int(*func)(void*arg) and void*arg arguments like BSD's rfork_thread.
Note that this mess reduction would be severe enough to solve
the problems with sharing a syscall.
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