[inkyoto]

> In 1970 it might have been the only way to provide a flexible API, but nowadays we have a great variety of extensible serialization formats better than "struct".

Actually, fork(2) was very inefficient in the 1970's and for another decade, but that changed with BSD 4.3 which shipped an entirely new VMM in 1990 in 4.3-Reno BSD, which – subsequently – allowed a CoW fork(2) to come into existence in 4.4 BSD in 1993.

Two changes sped fork (2) up dramatically, but before then it entailed copying not just process' structs but also the entire memory space upon a fork.

[tliltocatl]

AFAIR it was quite efficient (basically free) on pre-VM PDP-11 where the kernel swapped the whole address space on a context switch. It only involved swapping to a new disk area.

[rwmj]

I used MINIX on 8086 which was similar and it definitely was not efficient. It had to make a copy of the whole address space on fork. It was the introduction of paging and copy-on-write that made fork efficient.

[Joker_vD]

Oh, is that how MINIX did that? AIUI, the original UNIX could only hold one process in memory at a time, so its fork() would dump the process's current working space to disk, then rename it with a new PID, and return to the user space — essentially, the parent process literally turned into the child process. That's also where the misconception "after fork(), the child gets to run before the parent" comes from.