This thread went viral. The main takeaways:

• After calling fork(), a parent process gets its entire address space write protected to facilitate COW. This causes page faults.
• This makes fork() unsafe to call from anywhere in a process with realtime deadlines — including non realtime threads! Usually non RT can do what they want, but that is an interesting exception.
• On modern glibc, system() doesn’t use fork(), it uses posix_spawn(). But is posix_spawn() safe from a non RT thread?
• posix_spawn() doesn’t COW — the parent/child literally share memory — so the page fault issue doesn’t apply. However the parent is suspended to prevent races between the child and parent. This seems RT unsafe…
• However, only the caller thread of the parent is suspended, meaning the RT threads are not suspended and continue running with no page faults.
• So it is safe to use system() or posix_spawn() from a non RT thread.