Casey Dahlin (cjdahlin(a)ncsu.edu) said:
Its not the fork or exec per se. It is the disk IO associated with
loading
the binary images. Normally this isn't too much of an issue, but in the
highly IO-sensitive init process it can cause huge issues. Remember, seek
time is the big issue with disk IO, so size of data to load is not the
metric to go by.
So, switch to a storage metaphor that doesn't penalize seeks.
While that's somewhat of a joke, you do want to avoid over-optimizing for what
may not be the common case.
Bill