Re: [TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces

[Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>]

On 8/1/21, John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>
> Nowadays it's a question whether fork() makes sense any more.   "A fork()
> in the road" [Baumann et al. 2019] <
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf>
> is an interesting argument against fork():
>
> * It doesn't compose.
> * It is insecure by default.
> * It is slow (there are about 25 properties a process has in addition to
> its memory and hardware state, and each of these needs to be copied or not)
> even using COW (which is itself a Good Thing and can and should be provided
> separately)
> * It is incompatible with a single-address-space design.
>
> In short, spawn() beats fork() like a drum, and fork() should be
> deprecated. To be sure, the paper comes out of Microsoft Research, but I
> find it pretty compelling anyway.
>
There's a third kind of primitive that is superior to either spawn()
or fork() IMO, specifically one that creates a completely empty child
process and returns a context that lets the parent set up the child's
state using normal APIs. To start the child the parent would either
call exec() to start the child running a different program, or call a
new function that starts the child with a parent-provided entry point
and whatever memory mappings the parent set up. Both fork() and
spawn() could be implemented on top of this easily enough with
basically no additional overhead compared to implementing both as
primitives. This is what I plan to do on the OS I'm writing
(manipulating the child's state won't require any additional
primitives beyond regular file I/O since literally all process state
will have a file-based interface).