Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 13:00:55 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer <julian@ref.tfs.com> To: terry@freebsd.org, proven@freebsd.org Cc: jb@cimlogic.com.au, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Arrrgh (Was Re: ideas from netbsd) Message-ID: <199511082100.NAA05174@ref.tfs.com> In-Reply-To: <199511082036.HAA23957@werple.net.au> from "John Birrell" at Nov 9, 95 07:30:55 am
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Ok, There seems to be some misunderstandings about what is going on with pthreads.. CAP (Chris Provenzo (sp?)) has a pthreads library that is proving to be well thought out and liked. this will be ported to freeBSD. It will initially be a standard-though-optional library. Along with this are a number of important changes that are needed in the libraries (notibly errno and similar things). These changes are being worked on and will be made as changes to our sources of libc (and any other libs that need it) Initially they will be available through separate library compiled from the same sources. This is simply to make sure that the rest of the world doesn't get hosed when we make these changes.. changes to include files will be guarded with _THREAD_SAFE_ and this define will be defined when creating the threaded library. John Birrel (sp?) is doing the technical middle-man work and working with CAP to get all the changes and porting done. I will commit them when they are happy with the results. An explicit goal of the porting effort is to initially have NO functional changes unless linking with the threaded library and defining _THREAD_SAFE_ At some point in the future, when and if there is a general rosy pink fuzzy feeling about how the threads are working, and if it can be shown that backwards compatibility won't be broken, we hope to make the thread-safe changes standard and NON optional.. in other words.. thread-safe operation will be the norm. This work is, as specified above, being done with CAP, and as he is the person working with NetBSD and others on this, we will not be 'inventing the world from scratch' but participating in a multi-OS project. I believe that when NetBSD get their Thread-safe changes done, they will be (probably) coming from the same source, and they will benefit from what we do ahead of them in this area, as we will benefit by what they do ahead of us.. John and CAP already have working versions of this stuff so it's not 'pipe dreams'. More on a 'pipe dream' scale, is the eventual support for independently schedulable threads. I see the first version of this being built ON TOP of pthreads (which has support for kernel threads already I believe) utilising the 'rfork' changes posted here recently.. but this is the 'project after next' :) Any questions?
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