[linux] The difference between fork(), vfork(), exec() and clone()

  • execve() replaces the current executable image with another one loaded from an executable file.
  • fork() creates a child process.
  • vfork() is a historical optimized version of fork(), meant to be used when execve() is called directly after fork(). It turned out to work well in non-MMU systems (where fork() cannot work in an efficient manner) and when fork()ing processes with a huge memory footprint to run some small program (think Java's Runtime.exec()). POSIX has standardized the posix_spawn() to replace these latter two more modern uses of vfork().
  • posix_spawn() does the equivalent of a fork()/execve(), and also allows some fd juggling in between. It's supposed to replace fork()/execve(), mainly for non-MMU platforms.
  • pthread_create() creates a new thread.
  • clone() is a Linux-specific call, which can be used to implement anything from fork() to pthread_create(). It gives a lot of control. Inspired on rfork().
  • rfork() is a Plan-9 specific call. It's supposed to be a generic call, allowing several degrees of sharing, between full processes and threads.

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