NAME¶
rfork
—
manipulate process resources
LIBRARY¶
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS¶
#include
<unistd.h>
pid_t
rfork
(
int
flags);
DESCRIPTION¶
Forking, vforking or rforking are the only ways new processes are created. The
flags argument to
rfork
() selects which resources of the
invoking process (parent) are shared by the new process (child) or initialized
to their default values. The resources include the open file descriptor table
(which, when shared, permits processes to open and close files for other
processes), and open files. The
flags
argument is the logical OR of some subset of:
RFPROC
- If set a new process is created; otherwise changes affect the current
process.
RFNOWAIT
- If set, the child process will be dissociated from the parent. Upon exit
the child will not leave a status for the parent to collect. See
wait(2).
RFFDG
- If set, the invoker's file descriptor table (see
intro(2)) is copied; otherwise the two
processes share a single table.
RFCFDG
- If set, the new process starts with a clean file descriptor table. Is
mutually exclusive with
RFFDG
.
RFTHREAD
- If set, the new process shares file descriptor to process leaders table
with its parent. Only applies when neither
RFFDG
nor
RFCFDG
are set.
RFMEM
- If set, the kernel will force sharing of the entire address space,
typically by sharing the hardware page table directly. The child will thus
inherit and share all the segments the parent process owns, whether they
are normally shareable or not. The stack segment is not split (both the
parent and child return on the same stack) and thus
rfork
() with the RFMEM flag may not
generally be called directly from high level languages including C. May be
set only with RFPROC
. A helper function
is provided to assist with this problem and will cause the new process to
run on the provided stack. See
rfork_thread(3) for information. Note that a
lot of code will not run correctly in such an environment.
RFSIGSHARE
- If set, the kernel will force sharing the sigacts structure between the
child and the parent.
RFTSIGZMB
- If set, the kernel will deliver a specified signal to the parent upon the
child exit, instead of default SIGCHLD. The signal number
signum
is specified by oring the
RFTSIGFLAGS(signum)
expression into
flags. Specifying signal number 0
disables signal delivery upon the child exit.
RFLINUXTHPN
- If set, the kernel will deliver SIGUSR1 instead of SIGCHLD upon thread
exit for the child. This is intended to mimic certain Linux clone
behaviour.
File descriptors in a shared file descriptor table are kept open until either
they are explicitly closed or all processes sharing the table exit.
If
RFPROC
is set, the value returned in the
parent process is the process id of the child process; the value returned in
the child is zero. Without
RFPROC
, the
return value is zero. Process id's range from 1 to the maximum integer
(
int) value. The
rfork
() system call will sleep, if
necessary, until required process resources are available.
The
fork
() system call can be implemented as
a call to
rfork
(
RFFDG |
RFPROC) but is not for backwards compatibility.
RETURN VALUES¶
Upon successful completion,
rfork
() returns a
value of 0 to the child process and returns the process ID of the child
process to the parent process. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned to the
parent process, no child process is created, and the global variable
errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS¶
The
rfork
() system call will fail and no
child process will be created if:
- [
EAGAIN
]
- The system-imposed limit on the total number of processes under execution
would be exceeded. The limit is given by the
sysctl(3) MIB variable
KERN_MAXPROC
. (The limit is actually
ten less than this except for the super user).
- [
EAGAIN
]
- The user is not the super user, and the system-imposed limit on the total
number of processes under execution by a single user would be exceeded.
The limit is given by the sysctl(3) MIB
variable
KERN_MAXPROCPERUID
.
- [
EAGAIN
]
- The user is not the super user, and the soft resource limit corresponding
to the resource argument
RLIMIT_NOFILE
would be exceeded (see
getrlimit(2)).
- [
EINVAL
]
- Both the RFFDG and the RFCFDG flags were specified.
- [
EINVAL
]
- Any flags not listed above were specified.
- [
EINVAL
]
- An invalid signal number was specified.
- [
ENOMEM
]
- There is insufficient swap space for the new process.
SEE ALSO¶
fork(2),
intro(2),
minherit(2),
vfork(2),
pthread_create(3),
rfork_thread(3)
HISTORY¶
The
rfork
() function first appeared in
Plan9.