From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2021 12:24:05 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfpJDJWKwtBjnRw3vYHur5Q23fTACDEgiFBft-kv2891Pg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAP2nic2NVbhuJ4rOWp58hSPfE+aabHNuEr08PHWQb-LseSZOtQ@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 12:16 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a measure of Unix having been wounded by its own success.
>
> fork() is a great model for a single-threaded text processing pipeline to
> do automated typesetting. (More generally, anything that is a
> straightforward composition of filter/transform stages.) Which is, y'know,
> what Unix is *for*.
>
fork() dates from a time that demand paging wasn't a thing. Processes were
as cheap as it got. There were no threads.
All the different variations on a theme on fork() since then have been to
either make threads super cheap to create, to optimize the exec case (which
already has been discussed a bit:), and/or to control what the new process
inherits.
It's not so great for a responsive GUI in front of a multi-function
> interactive program.
>
> These days, the vast majority of Unix applications are "stuff people play
> with on their phones."
>
Ah, a thread-heavy environment that's not all that exec intensive (but
that's complicated enough you can no longer safely do a naive fork/exec
when you need to)...
But mostly, it's threads.
Warner
> Adam
>
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 7:59 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Aug 01, 2021 at 10:42:53PM -0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>> > > spawn() beats fork()[;] fork() should be deprecated
>> >
>> > Spawn is a further complication of exec, which tells what signals and
>> > file descriptors to inherit in addition to what arguments and
>> > environment variables to pass.
>> >
>> > Fork has a place. For example, Program 1 in
>> > www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sieve/sieve.pdf forks like crazy and never
>> > execs. To use spawn, the program would have to be split in three (or
>> > be passed a switch setting).
>> >
>> > While you may dismiss Program 1 as merely a neat demo, the same idea
>> > applies in parallelizing code for use in a multiprocessor world.
>>
>> It's certainly clear that some kind of primitive is needed to create
>> new threads. An open question is whether if there exists some kind of
>> "new thread" primitve plus either spawn(2) or some kind of "create a
>> child process and then then frob like crazy using 'echo XXX >
>> /proc/<pid>/<magic files>'" whether there still is a need for a
>> fork(2) system call.
>>
>> Obviously, as soon as we start going down this path, we're deviated
>> quite strongly from the "radical simplicity" of Unix Version 7 that
>> people have accused modern systems (whether they be Linux or FreeBSD)
>> of lacking. It's rather interesting that we haven't heard complaints
>> about how people who dare to try come up with new API's are somehow
>> traitors to "The Unix Philosphy" that we've seen on other threads. :-)
>>
>> - Ted
>>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-08-02 18:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 87+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-08-02 2:42 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-02 14:58 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-08-02 18:15 ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-02 18:24 ` Warner Losh [this message]
2021-08-02 20:55 ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 21:06 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 21:25 ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02 21:59 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 22:33 ` John Cowan
2021-08-03 0:20 ` [TUHS] fork (Re: " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03 0:59 ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03 1:20 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-08-03 0:21 ` [TUHS] " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03 1:49 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03 3:21 ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03 3:27 ` Bakul Shah
2021-08-03 3:51 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03 7:19 ` arnold
2021-08-03 23:12 ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-04 15:04 ` Paul Winalski
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-10-01 12:11 Paul Ruizendaal
2021-09-30 11:41 Douglas McIlroy
2021-09-29 18:07 Noel Chiappa
2021-09-29 19:04 ` Dan Cross
2021-09-29 19:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-28 18:15 Noel Chiappa
2021-08-03 19:12 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-03 15:01 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-03 17:13 ` Tom Lyon via TUHS
2021-08-11 18:11 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-08-11 21:24 ` Tom Lyon via TUHS
2021-07-31 16:47 Ron Young
2021-08-02 2:34 ` Jim Carpenter
2021-08-02 2:38 ` Ron Young
2021-07-31 16:27 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-07-31 12:25 Michael Siegel
2021-07-31 13:05 ` Dan Halbert
2021-07-31 14:21 ` Adam Thornton
2021-07-31 14:25 ` Adam Thornton
2021-07-31 15:45 ` Richard Salz
2021-07-31 16:03 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:06 ` Richard Salz
2021-07-31 16:21 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:17 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:30 ` Dan Cross
2021-07-31 15:56 ` Paul Winalski
2021-07-31 16:19 ` Dan Cross
2021-08-01 17:44 ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 21:53 ` Dan Cross
2021-08-01 23:21 ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 23:36 ` John Cowan
2021-08-01 23:49 ` Larry McVoy
2021-08-02 0:28 ` Larry McVoy
2021-08-01 23:58 ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02 0:29 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-08-02 0:13 ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02 0:18 ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 0:54 ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02 1:04 ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02 1:05 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-08-02 2:10 ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02 2:32 ` Bakul Shah
2021-08-02 17:33 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-09-28 17:46 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-28 18:10 ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-29 16:40 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-29 16:57 ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-30 17:31 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-29 23:10 ` Phil Budne
2021-08-02 17:37 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-08-02 18:52 ` Clem Cole
2021-08-02 20:59 ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 21:06 ` Al Kossow
2021-08-02 21:14 ` Clem Cole
2021-08-02 21:13 ` Clem Cole
2021-08-01 16:51 ` Michael Siegel
2021-08-01 17:31 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-07-31 16:41 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 17:41 ` John Cowan
2021-07-31 17:30 ` Anthony Martin
2021-07-31 17:46 ` John Cowan
2021-07-31 18:56 ` Michael Siegel
2021-07-31 19:41 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 21:30 ` Michael Siegel
2021-08-01 17:48 ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 19:23 ` Richard Salz
2021-08-01 23:26 ` Chet Ramey
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