What is a fork used for?

fork is used to spawn processes in some parallel programs (like those written using MPI ). Note this is different from using threads, which don't have their own address space and exist within a process. Scripting languages use fork indirectly to start child processes.

What is a soft fork?

Soft fork: Think of a soft fork as a software upgrade for the blockchain. As long as it’s adopted by all users, it becomes a currency’s new set of standards. Soft forks have been used to bring new features or functions, typically at the programming level, to both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

What is a system call fork?

@kar: Once you have two processes, they can continue separately from there and one of them could replace itself (exex ()) with another program entirely. System call fork () is used to create processes. It takes no arguments and returns a process ID. The purpose of fork () is to create a new process, which becomes the child process of the caller.

Why does Google Chrome use fork?

If one dies or leaks memory, others are unaffected, so it functions as a mechanism for fault tolerance. Google Chrome uses fork to handle each page within a separate process. This will prevent client-side code on one page from bringing your whole browser down.