Re:I've now disabled systemd-oomd on my Fedora desktops
by takluyver on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @01:05PM
(#33897774)
> I speculate [fork] isn't common, or at least it isn't required for ordinary desktop apps.
From a science perspective, the ability to fork is really convenient for parallel processing. Load some data and then fork a pool of worker processes, and they can all read almost free copies of that data. This is much easier than setting up shared memory. It's a bigger deal on an HPC machine with 128 cores than a laptop with 8 cores, but even on a laptop it's a significant point in favour of Linux.
Getting rid of it in Linux would also be going against Linus' rule that the kernel never breaks userspace.
Re:I've now disabled systemd-oomd on my Fedora desktops
by josephcsible on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:39PM
(#33897411)
Windows is a terrible OS, especially for servers, so pointing out that it doesn't have something isn't really a great argument for that thing not being very important.
I speculate it isn't common, or at least it isn't required for ordinary desktop apps. Windows survives without fork().
> And isn't posix_spawn implemented in terms of vfork, which a lot of people like even less?
That sounds like a glibc implementation detail, not something required by the standard. I'm not an expert however. Simply, again I come back to: Windows can spawn processes without using it as an excuse to overcommit.