Re: vfork & co bugfix

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sun, 10 Jan 1999 22:35:44 -0800 (PST)


On 10 Jan 1999, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Darn it I missed the easy bug (All children waking up the parent),
> and found the hard one (waking up the parent if fork fails).

I missed it too, until I started thinking about all the possible
combinations.

> Question. Why don't we let CLONE_VFORK be a standard clone flag?

Because then we're back to the old problem: before doing a vfork(),
somebody could do a "clone(CLONE_VFORK)" (which would _not_ wait on the
semaphore like a real vfork() would), and now the wrong child can wake up
the parent and mess up the real vfork().

Linus

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