From: Brian Mitchell <binary42@...>
Date: 2005-05-03T12:58:35+09:00
Subject: Re: MMU-less systems and vfork.

On 5/2/05, Luke Graham <spoooq@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/3/05, Brian Mitchell <binary42@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have an upcoming project that will be on an MMU-less platform
> > (coldfire) running uClinux. I was possibly going to use ruby but it
> > seems that I cannot confirm if ruby supports vfork as an
> > implementation of forking or not. Is it possible at all?
> 
> You should probably do this in a c extension, you could pass in the execve
> (or whatever) arg from ruby.
> 

Sorry I should have been more clear on this.

My question was: Will ruby still run when fork is not available
(replacing fork with vfork or cutting out fork). The quick answer is
no. It will segfault if you add

#define fork vfork

to ruby and run "fork". Will it still work if I avoid fork in ruby and
use, like you said, a C extension to vfork for me? (I don't have my
hardware to run tests on yet).

In the end it looks like the answer is no but I am no expert so I
decided to ask this time around. This was all more of a curiosity. I
would love to be able to use a slim version of ruby to write higher
level code along with lower level C extensions. Anyone willing to
write a patch for me? ;-)

Thanks,
Brian.