Dirty Tricks: Launching a helper process under memory and latency constraints (pthread_create and vfork)

You need to launch a helper process, and while Linux’s fork is copy-on-write (COW), the page tables still need to be duplicated, and for a large virtual address space that could result in running out of memory and performance degradation. There are a wide array of solutions available to use, but one of them, namely vfork is mostly avoided due to a few difficult issues. First is that vfork pauses the parent thread while the child executes and eventually calls an exec family function, this is a huge latency problem for applications. Secondly is that there are a great many number of considerations to take into account when using vfork in a threaded application, and missing any one of those considerations can lead to serious problems.

It should be possible for posix_spawn to safely do all of this work via POSIX_SPAWN_USEVFORK, but often there is quite a lot of “work” that needs to be done just before the helper calls an exec family function, and that has lead to ever increasingly complex versions of posix_spawn like posix_spawn_file_actions_addclose, posix_spawn_file_actions_adddup2, posix_spawn_file_actions_destroy, posix_spawnattr_destroy, posix_spawnattr_getsigdefault, posix_spawnattr_getflags, posix_spawnattr_getpgroup, posix_spawnattr_getschedparam, posix_spawnattr_getschedpolicy, and posix_spawnattr_getsigmask. It might be simpler if the GNU C Library documented a small subset of functions you can safely call, which is in fact what the preceding functions are modelling. If you happen to select a set of operations that can’t be supported by posix_spawn with vfork then the implementation falls back to fork and you don’t know why. Therefore it is hard to use posix_spawn robustly.