Re: Synchronization problem with posix_spawn

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

On Aug  3 11:10, Peter Dons Tychsen via Cygwin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> On Fri, 2020-07-31 at 10:10 +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > Oh well.  I did a quick test with your new testcase (thanks for
> > that!)
> > and it seems to be a bit more complicated than I anticipated
> > yesterday.
> > The parent-child relationship between the processes is broken.  I
> > have
> > to think a while about this problem, stay tuned.
> 
> I also have seen this problem. I propose a different solution however.
> Why no get rid of the call to fork() all together. One of the things
> bogging down performance on larger setups is the calls to fork() are is
> inherently slow and should be avoided at all costs. Instead why don't
> we just call spawn(vpe) instead, which is quite stable and fast.
> 
> This would give a _huge_ boost to e.g. larger build jobs. Make supports
> posix_spawn, but it does not help on cygwin at it just calls back into
> fork().

spawn alone doesn't cut it, due to the requirement to support the
additional file actions and spawn atributes POSIX defines.  This
would require a revamp of Cygwin's spawn functionality, which is
already quite complicated.  So this is something I'm only willing
to do in homeopathic doses.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Maintainer