[BusyBox] Re: ifconfig: Clean up. [PATCH]

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 26 July 2005 13:16, Shaun Jackman wrote:

> internals. fork(2) is a very heavy weight system call; there are a
> number of reasons why you might want to avoid it if possible.

I agree with this.  For example: the standalone shell's need to fork and exec 
itself is kind of a hack (and my recent fix for it is not a proper fix; among 
other things it'll break if you chroot).  It would be much nicer if we could 
just call the appropriate busybox function and have it return, but 
accumulated resource leaks could easily become a problem if we did that now.

Conceptually, it's nice to be _able_ to clean up after ourselves.  (Of course 
for space reasons, chopping that out and letting the OS do it for us when 
appropriate is a requirement for busybox, but needing the ability NOT to do 
it is not a good argument against having the ability to do it.)

> It is 
> possible, and in fact not even that difficult, to build a busybox
> binary that does not require either fork(2) or execve(2). This opens
> up busybox to a number of embedded kernels that provide file system
> calls but not process calls.

I don't personally care about that so much, but I'm not against it either.

> Cheers,
> Shaun

Rob