Moving beyond fork() + exec()
Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system calls have been fork() [...]
AI Summary
The fork() system call is costly as it copies the entire process state, often wasted when immediately followed by exec(). Chen's patch set optimizes this pattern by introducing spawn_template_create(), which caches executable information to accelerate repeated launches of the same program. This template uses a structure with fields for arguments, environment, and actions like closing or duplicating file descriptors for each invocation.