So, are you suggesting then it could well be a bug with Leopard (it
works fine on Tiger and, it works fine as coded by simply removing
the
v from vfork)? Obviously, the simple solution on Leopard for now is
to
use fork. I shall proceed to make a small test program and submit to
Apple then.
I wouldn't consider it a significant bug; vfork is deprecated,
having been
a performance hack to improve performance on the VAX. The existence
of
modern systems with copy-on-write semantics makes it a waste of time
to try
to make things work with vfork
That's more or less true for Linux, but not for Mac OS X at least up
till 10.4.x (I haven't benchmarked on 10.5 yet). Compiling our
compiler with itself, which involves about 173 (v)fork+execs from a
single compiler run to assemble&link all the files, is 20% to 25%
slower with fork instead of vfork on a G4, and 35% to 40% on a G5 (32
bit processes in both cases) on 10.4.x. And for clarity: this is
relative to the entire time needed for compiling+assembling+linking
everything (on the G5: 24 vs 15 seconds), not some academic mbench-
like speed difference between the fork and vforks.
Copying the memory maps is extremely expensive on Darwin (at least in
the versions I tested on), and gets progressively more expensive the
more memory the program has allocated.
The modern alternative is obviously posix_spawn, but we cannot use
that since we still support 10.3.x (it even probably even still works
on 10.1 and 10.2 as well, but I don't test those anymore).
Jonas
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