Fork (system call) rfork and IRIX's sproc, Linux's clone was inspired by Plan 9's rfork and can be used to implement threads (though application programmers will typically use a higher-level interface such as pthreads, implemented on top of clone). The "separate stacks" feature from Plan 9 and IRIX has been omitted because (according to Linus Torvalds) it causes too much overhead. In the original design of the VMS operating system (1977), a copy operation with subsequent mutation of the content of a few specific addresses for the new process as in forking was considered risky. Errors in the current process state may be
Linus Torvalds Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel Prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character". Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army Uusimaa brigade, in the summer of 1989, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he held the rank of