Re: Userland threading and messaging

[Chip Norkus <wd@xxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 16 August 2003 03:15 am, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> Hi all,
> after a restless night I had some thought about the userland
> threading. First let's recall our current infrastructure:
> a) the old synchronous syscall interface
> b) the new asynchronous sysmessage interface
> c) LWP aka virtual CPUs
> d) signal trampoline code.
>
> IMO we want to drop a) and work much like the old MIT (?) pthread
> implementation entirely in userspace. Therefore we have a process
> most if not all syscalls / messages asynchronous. The scheduling
> and esp. the handling of different userland threads needs some
> context switching which could be copied from the kernel. The
> signal code could be reused as upcall mechanism to notify the
> process about POSIX signals, finished messages or want ever we
> want. That's all fine.
>

What about thread-to-processor binding?  For compute-bound programs it is 
very nice to be able to explicitly stick threads onto different CPUs.  
For that there would need to be some kind of kernel code at least.

[snip]
>
> Joerg

-wd
-- 
chip norkus; renaissance hacker;                wd@xxxxxxxx
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare     http://telekinesis.org/