Question

Hi I am trying to create a counter that will just count the number of times the system call vfork() has been called in fork.c in the Linux kernel source. I’am following how total_forks is implemented. Total_forks is defined in sched.h. But I can’t find where it is initialized to zero.

Answer 1

I’m guessing you are talking about the Linux kernel, and the variable declared in sched.h and defined here. It’s a global variable (defined at file scope and not static) – these are implicitly initialized to zero. Try this in you own code:

#include <stdio.h>

int var;

int main( int argc, char* argv[] ) {
    printf( "var is %d\n", var );
    return 0;
}