On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Erik McKee wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> This is one of my first posts here, so try to be gentle, please ;)
> 
> Seems like if a thread which shares a VM with all the other threads of the
> same family does an execve, the following would be likely to occurr, using
> the standard definition of execve.  The vm would be overwriteen with the
> new image, but this would have to wwipe out all the other threads in the
> process, 'cuz otherwise everything they refer to has just been overwritten
> by the results of the execve.  However, if the execve'ing thread was
> allowed to spawn off intop a new address space before the execve, it would
> then become a new process, and leave the parent procvess with one less
> thread to worry about.

I think that's close to Linus' idea.
But it reminds me more a fork()+exec() rather than a simple exec().

OK. I'm clueless C programmer. I write:

program A:
  pid = getpid();       /* imagine is 300 */
  ...
  exec("program B");

program B:
  ...
  pid = getpid();       /* I'm expecting 300 */

Then I modify A:

program A2:
  pid = getpid();       /* 400 */
  if (!fork()) {
        exec("program B);
  }
  ...

program B:
  ...
  pid = getpid();       /* I'm expecting != 400 */


This is ok because that's what I asked for.
Suppose I make a MT version of A. It would behave just like A2.
The thread who's performing the exec() becomes a different process
and program B sees a different pid.

It's like saying: an exec() in a MT process behaves like a fork()+exec()
sequence in a normal process.

I'm not really against it... it's just a little weird.
Killing all threads, and doing a "real" exec(), leads to the expected
semantic. Of course, since you should expect the "defined" semantic,
that matter is about choosing the definition. B-)

BTW, I don't think it needs to be a kernel matter. exec() in a MT 
program can be defined to kill all threads in userland before doing
the exec().

> 
> Or am I being very stupid and overlooking something critical here?

Do you consider the above problem "critical"?  B-)

> 
> Have a nice day ;)
> Erik McKee
> 
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.TM.
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