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The Plan 9 operating system, created by the designers of Unix, includes fork but also a variant called "rfork" that permits fine-grained sharing of resources between parent and child processes, including the address space (except for a stack segment, which is unique to each process), environment variables and the filesystem namespace; [15] this ...
fork() is the name of the system call that the parent process uses to "divide" itself ("fork") into two identical processes. After calling fork(), the created child process is an exact copy of the parent except for the return value of the fork() call. This includes open files, register state, and all memory allocations, which includes the ...
There are two major procedures for creating a child process: the fork system call (preferred in Unix-like systems and the POSIX standard) and the spawn (preferred in the modern (NT) kernel of Microsoft Windows, as well as in some historical operating systems).
Copy-on-write finds its main use in operating systems, sharing the physical memory of computers running multiple processes, in the implementation of the fork() system call. Typically, the new process does not modify any memory and immediately executes a new process, replacing the address space entirely.
David A. Wheeler notes [9] four possible outcomes of a fork, with examples: The death of the fork. This is by far the most common case. It is easy to declare a fork, but considerable effort to continue independent development and support. A re-merging of the fork (e.g., egcs becoming "blessed" as the new version of GNU Compiler Collection.)
In Unix-like operating systems, new processes are created by the fork() system call. The PID is returned to the parent process, enabling it to refer to the child in further function calls. The parent may, for example, wait for the child to terminate with the waitpid() function, or terminate the process with kill().
Implementations of the fork–join model will typically fork tasks, fibers or lightweight threads, not operating-system-level "heavyweight" threads or processes, and use a thread pool to execute these tasks: the fork primitive allows the programmer to specify potential parallelism, which the implementation then maps onto actual parallel execution. [1]
A high-level overview of the Linux kernel's system call interface, which handles communication between its various components and the userspace. In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system [a] on which it is executed.