[Chicken-janitors] #941: Add option to process-fork to allow creating a subprocess with only the current thread

[Chicken Trac]

#941: Add option to process-fork to allow creating a subprocess with only the
current thread
------------------------------------+---------------------------------------
 Reporter:  sjamaan                 |       Owner:         
     Type:  enhancement             |      Status:  new    
 Priority:  minor                   |   Milestone:  someday
Component:  core libraries          |     Version:  4.8.x  
 Keywords:  posix, processes, fork  |  
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 It would be useful to have the option to call process-fork without having
 all the threads running in the new process (like in SCSH's fork
 procedure).

 This will make it easy to fork off "worker" processes in multithreaded
 server processes without causing threads to write multiple copies of
 response data to all connected clients.

 After discussion with Felix we came to the conclusion that this needs a
 hook in the scheduler to "promote" arbitrary threads to become the
 primordial thread, and to blow away all non-primordial threads. Including
 file descriptors and the I/O wait list, as well as the pending threads
 list etc.

 When this is implemented, people can safely use the scsh-process egg's
 macros in spiffy, for example.

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Ticket URL: <http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/941>
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