Re: RFC: import of posix_spawn GSoC results

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 03:26:07PM -0500, Mouse wrote:
> This either has a very simplistic idea of what child processes do
> between forking and execing/exiting, or it doesn't actually buy you
> much.  (What do I suspect it's missing?  flock().  sigaction().
> Writing to shared memory.  To name just the first three that come to
> mind.)

The normal actions between fork and exec are:
- file descriptor table changes
- setuid/setgid
- process group changes
- resetting signals to sane default
- setting resource limits

I think the only case not currently covered by the Unix2008 API is the
last. The first four actions already cover the far majority of all code
using fork+exec though. I can't think of a good reason for wanting to do
either flock or writing to shared memory from the child...

Joerg