Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for over 22 years.
Every once in a while, you see a discussion that blows up into one of those head-scratching moments. One where you ask yourself, “What was the story behind that one?” Recently, I came across such a gem in the form of a patch titled “Implement close-on-fork”. The actual patch is fairly pedestrian. It frees up some resources when forking a new process to prevent a possible race condition within the “system” C library function.
What’s interesting is that the team at Garmin have found some behaviour in their application code they didn’t like (“system” in Linux isn’t implemented the same way as it is on Solaris, and is documented to not be thread-safe). Instead of addressing it with a relatively trivial change to the application, they embarked on an odyssey of standardisation to change the POSIX (Unix) specification to match Solaris behaviour.