3 ms·

I did this inadvertently in the 80s on an Encore Multimax, a parallel computer base don NS 32k processors. I was writing a parallel program in assembly that had

by 2sk21 7y ago

I did this inadvertently in the 80s on an Encore Multimax, a parallel computer base don NS 32k processors. I was writing a parallel program in assembly that had to call fork() in a loop to spawn a few child processes. I did not realize that register contents are not copied over to the child process after a fork call and the loop counter was in a register. They had to actually power down the system to get it out of this state :-)

tus88 7y ago
Why was the child process still in the loop forking though?
- 2sk21 7y ago
  When you do a fork in a loop, the child process wakes up in the same loop.
  - tus88 7y ago
    Yes, but the way you write child processes is to check the return of fork() and then break out of whatever the parent was doing and go into a child function.