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Date:      Sat, 8 Aug 1998 07:59:06 +1000 (EST)
From:      John Birrell  <jb@cimlogic.com.au>
To:        lists@tar.com
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Kernel threads (Was Re: Pthreads woes revisited.)
Message-ID:  <199808072159.HAA11063@cimlogic.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <199808071503.KAA14839@ns.tar.com> from "Richard Seaman, Jr." at "Aug 7, 98 10:03:43 am"

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Richard Seaman, Jr. wrote:
> Is there a description of what needs to be done, though?  Are your
> patches available anywhere?  If someone is really going to look at
> this, I assume they don't want to duplicate work already started, 
> and I assume they don't want to go in some direction the core team
> doesn't support?

There are a number of existing syscalls which need to be redesigned to
allow a POSIX thread API. AFAIK, these syscalls were (are?) used by
NCI and were added by John for them. They aren't built into the FreeBSD
libc so I doubt that anyone else uses them. I haven't asked for opinions
about cleaning this up (until now 8-).

I think there are two stages to this work. The first is to get the
syscall API in and working in a uni-processor environment. The second
stage is to work on the SMP side, but as you'll note from messages
posted by John, there is a significant amount of work there for someone
with John's ability and level of understanding of the VM.

I guess it is possible to complete the first stage now, but I doubt that
the second stage will happen within 6 months. I'd also say that trying
to do the second stage now would destabilize 3.0 and this is something
I don't want to see happen. I know that this is not what people want to
hear.

-- 
John Birrell - jb@cimlogic.com.au; jb@freebsd.org http://www.cimlogic.com.au/
CIMlogic Pty Ltd, GPO Box 117A, Melbourne Vic 3001, Australia +61 418 353 137

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