re: RasterMan on linux and threads

Richard Gooch (rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca)
Fri, 17 Dec 1999 18:50:37 -0700

Stephen Frost writes:
> Hrm. For some reason I had thought that there was, for a
> time, a version of linuxthreads that did it ALL in user-space, and
> didn't use clone(). This would have been 3+ (or so) years ago,
> IIRC. I also seem to recall Linus talking about hoping someone
> would use clone (Or something similar if I'm not remembering
> exactly) so that he could see if it would work well for threading or
> not...

There was a user-space pthreads implementation from MIT, and some
people were playing with it about 3 years ago. I took one look at it
and curled up my nose (once I realised it was user-space only) and
discarded it.

Around the same time, LinuxThreads from Xavier was available, and used
clone(2). Unfortunately, it was still a bit raw, so I ended up using
clone(2) directly. A few months later LinuxThreads was in pretty good
shape. I'm still using clone(2) directly, though, because:

- I'm too lazy to switch (even though it's just a matter of removing
#ifdef LINUX_CLONE and falling back to pthreads)

- pthreads have extra overheads that I don't feel compelled to absorb.

Regards,

Richard....
Permanent: rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Current: rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca

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