4 ms·
This is not true. NT never had fork, was always based on the assumption of an MMU and Dave Cutler was a well known fork hater in the 80s long before this paper
by epcoa 4mo ago
This is not true. NT never had fork, was always based on the assumption of an MMU and Dave Cutler was a well known fork hater in the 80s long before this paper came out and made it cool to be so. By the time Windows 95 was out, the baseline was 386 with an MMU. CreateThread was initially designed for NT in 1993 though (which didn’t support pre-386 CPUs).
- JdeBP 4mo agoAs mentioned elsewhere on this page, Windows NT had fork from the start. Vide NtCreateProcess and what happens if an image file is not explicitly supplied. * https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkbook/proc.pdf https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb...
- dcrazy 4mo agoNtCreateProcess doesn’t accept an image file parameter.
- JdeBP 4mo agoYou haven't read the doco. I did point to some. The image file is supplied (or not) via the section object. Think it through. Windows NT supported fork from the start in its POSIX subsystem, that subsystem was layered on top of the Native API, and this is the Native API mechanism that the POSIX subsystem employed. Although it took until Gary Nebbett for someone to publicly show how, even though people knew informally back in 1993.
- epcoa 4mo agoNtCreateProcess was not a public Windows API. NT was flexible, that’s not what was being discussed, which should have been clear from the context.
- keitmo 4mo agoNT performed unnatural acts to implement fork semantics for the POSIX subsystem.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]