Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1076018/

Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system
calls have been fork(), which creates a child process as a copy of
the parent, and exec(), which runs a new program in the place of
the current one. In Linux kernels, those system calls are better known as
clone()
and execve(),
but the core functionality remains the same. While there is elegance to
this process-creation model, there are shortcomings as well. A recent proposal from
Li Chen to add “spawn templates” to the kernel will not be accepted in its
current form, but it may point the way toward a new process-creation
primitive in the future.