[LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN . Thank you for visiting LWN.net! 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.…