Fork (operating System) - Forking in Other Operating Systems

Forking in Other Operating Systems

The fork mechanism (1969) in Unix and Linux maintains implicit assumptions on the underlying hardware: linear memory and a paging mechanism that enable an efficient, memory copy operation of a contiguous address range. In the original design of the VMS (now OpenVMS) operating system (1977), a copy operation with subsequent mutation of the content of a few specific addresses for the new process as in forking was considered risky. Errors in the current process state may be copied to a child process. Here, the metaphor of process spawning is used: each component of the memory layout of the new process is newly constructed from scratch. From a software-engineering viewpoint this latter approach would be considered more clean and safe, but the fork mechanism is still predominant due to its efficiency. The spawn metaphor was later adopted in Microsoft operating systems (1993).

Read more about this topic:  Fork (operating System)

Famous quotes containing the words operating and/or systems:

    Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword; shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.
    Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)