> From the annals of the POSIX wars: the rationale for posix_spawn() > was to support systems without MMUs, where fork() is expensive, and > vfork() impossible.
I would quibble with calling vfork() `impossible'. Perhaps I'm missing osmehting, but vfork() seems particularly well-suited to such a system to me - the "borrow the VM" semantics strike me as exactly what you want when context-switching is expensive. (Though of course the `V' of `VM' is a bit of a misnomer in that circumstance.) In any case, even if I'm wrong, vfork isn't impossible, just, at worst, ludicrously expensive. :-) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B