vfork()

[Jim Burns]

in article <1991Mar19.181626.28739 at dg-rtp.dg.com>, hunt at dg-rtp.rtp.dg.com (Greg Hunt) says:

> The vfork(2) system call does the same thing as the fork(2) system call
> except that the child process shares the same address space as the
> parent process, instead of having a complete copy of the parent's
> address space made for it during the fork.  It uses the same mechanism
> as fork(2) to indicate which process is the child (the call returns
> zero) and which process is the parent (the call returns the PID of the
> child).

The HP-UX man pages state that a particular implementation may make no
distinction between fork(2) and vfork(2), and programs should not depend
on vfork(2)'s distinctions. How true is this generally? If a vendor
provides vfork(2), can it be expected to be different from fork(2), in the
main?
-- 
BURNS,JIM (returned student & GT Research Institute staff member)
Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech Station 30178,
Atlanta Georgia, 30332            | Internet: jb107 at prism.gatech.edu
uucp:	  ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!jb107