37 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
37 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
(THIS DESCRIPTION IS OUT-OF-DATE)
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How does vfork work?
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When a program calls vfork, cygwin attempts to short circuit its
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normal, expensive fork mechanism.
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Vfork is mainly smoke and mirrors. A call to vfork contines to execute
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in the current process but first it returns a pid of 0 so that process
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will execute code intended for the child in a UNIX system. Before
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returning the zero, vfork makes a copy of the current fd table so that
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closing an fd in the "child" will not affect the "parent".
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Some of this info is stored in a per-thread structure but vfork is not
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really thread-safe since it also stores the fd "backup" table in the
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global fd table.
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The process continues to execute until it hits some type of exec call.
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The exec call is essentially translated into a spawn NO_WAIT call and
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the new process is started via this mechanism. After execing, the
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"child" process no longer should exist, so the spawn code longjmps back
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to the original vfork call. The previously opened fds are closed and
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the parent's fd table is restored. vfork() then returns the pid of the
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just-spawned process.
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Meanwhile, the just-spawned child notices that it has been spawned as
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the result of a vfork and closes the extra file handles.
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This all relies on the fact that the child in a vfork call can affect
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just about everything in the parent except for the parent's fds.
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The assumption is that a vfork is always just used as a method for
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starting a program.
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The assumption is also that all of this is much faster than the
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slow method that cygwin uses to implement fork().
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