NtCreateProcess redux

[Ryan Johnson]

Hi all,

I know that folks have looked before into NtCreateProcess as a way of 
doing a real fork() in cygwin, but it's very unclear from the various 
list archives why it's still a bad idea today, other than its being 
undocumented.

The best explanation I could find was from Corinna, in 2008 [1]:
> One reason not to use ZwCreateProcess was that up to the 1.5.25 release
> we're still supporting Windows 9x users.  However, two attempts to use
> ZwCreateProcess on NT-based systems failed for one reason or another.
Given that cygwin no longer supports anything older than XP (SP3?), and 
that win7 seems determined to make the current fork() implementation not 
work reliably, might it be worth revisiting? I realize the answer 
depends strongly on the nature of those failures Corinna refers to 
(could somebody provide more details?).

I've looked into all kinds of ways of trying to work around the address 
space layout problems over the last week, and at this point the idea of 
reverse-engineering a single function call that might make the whole 
issue go away is pretty attractive. The current approach to fork() seems 
to depend on guessing how Windows handles collisions in dll base 
addresses in order to work around unwanted behaviors, which is pretty 
dicey work. Besides, if we're willing to even talk about hacking how 
locale.nls gets mapped...

If there's no interest in revisiting NtCreateProcess, I have some really 
crazy ideas to offer, but they would still leave us copying whole 
address spaces and trying to outsmart Windows along the way.

[1] 
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/32040421/ntcreateprocess-and-fork.aspx