light-weight processes in Unix

[bjorn at alberta.UUCP]

In article <4817 at brl-adm.ARPA>, dms at hermes.ai.mit.EDU (David M. Siegel) writes:
> We'd like to add some kind of light-weight process support to our Sun
> 3.2 system. What we would like to have is the ability to fork off a
> procedure (not a fully linked program) that shares the full address
> space of the parent process. The stack and heap for the child process
> would be malloc'ed out of the parent's heap.

I have a package that does this.  It's called Sup-K(tm) (Small
unprotected Kernel).  It's not terrificly difficult to do:
similar to writing a kernel for a personal computer that
doesn't come equipped with a MMU.  In fact Sup-K could
be used as multitasking kernel on say Atari STs.  The current
version of Sup-k does round robin scheduling, but any old
scheduling algorithm can be used.  You do have to link your
program with a munged version of Sun's 'sigtramp' module in
order to be able to modify all of your process registers
on signal return, this however is transparent to the user
except for inclusion of the module at link time.  Apart from
that no modifications are needed to Sun code.  Sup-k can
easily be made to run on most BSD based systems (4.2 and up).

		Bjorn R. Bjornsson
		UUCP:	alberta!bjorn
		Phone:	(403)-439-9541
--
Sup-K is a trademark of Bijective Technology.