Hello, everyone.

It appears that in GNU/Hurd, memory mappings obtained by 'mmap' with MAP_SHARED
and MAP_ANON as its flags are not being inherited by children processes.

Here's a simple program that illustrates the issue:

===============================

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>

int main (void)
{
  void *p = mmap (0, 4096, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
    MAP_SHARED | MAP_ANON, -1, 0);

  if (p == MAP_FAILED)
    {
      puts ("mmap failed.");
      return (1);
    }

  int pid = fork ();
  if (pid < 0)
    {
      puts ("fork failed.");
      return (1);
    }
  else if (pid == 0)
    {
      *(int *)p = 69;
      puts ("value was set.");
    }
  else
    {
      int r;
      wait (&r);
      printf ("done waiting for the child"
              "\nvalue is: %d\n", *(int *)p);
    }

  return (0);
}

==================================

The parent process ends up printing zero, which is wrong.

A quick inspection at the source code tells me that this code ends up calling
'vm_allocate' as an optimization when it sees that the user requested an anonymous mapping with protection RW. However, it's not taking into account
that 'vm_allocate' has a default inheritance value of 'COPY'.

An easy workaround is to simply remove the 'vm_allocate' optimization, and always use 'vm_map' by removing the

if ((flags & (MAP_TYPE|MAP_INHERIT)) == MAP_ANON
block.