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Date:      Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:24:12 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at (Hr.Ladavac)
Cc:        terry@lambert.org, narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, igor@jabber.paco.odessa.ua, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD vs. NT Stability
Message-ID:  <199608122024.NAA25973@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199608121901.AA164676506@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at> from "Hr.Ladavac" at Aug 12, 96 09:01:46 pm

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> > Other than some experimental code that I did which never made it
> > into the UnixWare 2.x release, I don't know of *any* user/kernel
> > hybrid threads implementations, sorry.
> 
> Isn't SunOS 5 threads over LWP's such a hybrid (at least according to
> a rather ancient documentation which I had in hand.)

No, it is not.  The ability to associate multiple user contexts with
a smaller number of shedulable kernel entities is a means of assigning
number of quantum to a threaded process.  The implementation does *NOT*
cooperatively schedule user contexts to run on top of kernel entities
based on kernl conversion of a blocking operation to an async operation
+ a context switch.

I've already had this discussion with Bryan O'Sullivan of Sun Microsystems
and other at USL...


The confusion probably results from the University of Washington's
user threads implementation (Paper: SPARC Register Windows and User
Space Threading) that was the basis of Sun's LWP (Light Weight
Process) user space thread implementation in SunOS 4.x.

This is not to be confused with kernel schedulable entities in Solaris
(also called LWP's or Light Weight Processes).

The name space clash was probably done for the same reasons that Sun
calls Solaris SunOS:  marketing (Q: Can I buy SunOS? A: Yes, we would
love to sell you "SunOS".  Q: Does SunOS support LWP's? A: Yes, the
"SunOS" you will be buying supports "LWP"'s just fine...).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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