Request for Review: 5049299: (process) Use posix_spawn, not fork, on S10 to avoid swap exhaustion (original) (raw)

Rob McKenna rob.mckenna at oracle.com
Thu Nov 22 21:27:13 UTC 2012


Hi folks,

Looking for a review for the webrev below, which also resolves:

7175692: (process) Process.exec should use posix_spawn [macosx]

For additional context and a brief description it would be well worth looking at the following thread started by Michael McMahon, who did the brunt of the work for this fix:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2009-May/thread.html#1644

Basically the fix aims to swap fork for posix_spawn as the default process launch mechanism on Solaris and Mac OSX in order to avoid swap exhaustion issues encountered with fork()/exec(). It also offers a flag (java.lang.useFork) to allow a user to revert to the old behaviour.

I'm having trouble seeing the wood for the trees at this point so I'm anticipating plenty of feedback. In particular I'd appreciate some discussion on:

The webrev is at:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~robm/5049299/webrev.01/ <http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Erobm/5049299/webrev.01/>

Thanks a lot,

 -Rob


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