Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Why fork? (long, was Re: IBM PC prehistory)
Message-ID: <1990Jan17.204433.18006@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <610@ssp11.idca.tds.philips.nl> <952@dms.UUCP> <1239@cirrusl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 90 20:44:33 GMT

In article <1239@cirrusl.UUCP> pete@cirrusl (Pete Carpenter) writes:
>Actually, the Berkley folks have a system call vfork(), which does the 
>fork/exec in one operation....

Nope, sorry, wrong, vfork is just a variant of fork that runs faster at
the cost of truly horrible semantics.  It was basically a kludge to get
around some hardware/firmware problems that made it impossible to do a
proper copy-on-write optimized fork on the early VAXen.  It's already
greatly outlived its real usefulness.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu