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From: Christopher January <ccj00 AT doc DOT ic DOT ac DOT uk>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: A real fork() on NT
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 11:03:00 +0000
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> When looking at XP's CreateProcessW (or rather, CreateProcessInternalW) I
> noticed something strange about the way it creates a process.  It seems
> that NT is sort of capable of a fork() command.  The function
> NtCreateProcess appears to create a "blank" process, into which you can put
> anything you want.  After NtCreateProcess, kernel32 maps the EXE into that
> new process's memory space, creates a thread, and finally calls
> NtResumeThread to start its execution.
>
> If this long, nasty, scattered function could be reverse engineered, it
> should be possible to create a true fork() for NT, instead of doing the
> normal cygwin "hack" method.
Coincidentally, I was looking into a similar thing myself. Windows NT has a 
POSIX subsystem that's capable of doing fork()'s so it is obviously possible. 
Have you any ideas of the arguments passed to the function or what it returns?

Chris

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