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Date:      Wed, 28 Apr 1999 13:57:55 -0700
From:      Matthew Reimer <mreimer@vpop.net>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   MFC pthreads before 3.2 is released?
Message-ID:  <37277653.1EF64476@vpop.net>

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Would someone MFC Dan's/John's threads patches before the 3.2 freeze?
The reason is performance; to quote a post by Richard Seaman:

> On another note, the recent changes to the FreeBSD user
> pthreads code, which you committed on about March 22,
> appears to be a major improvement in this code.  On my
> very crude benchmarks, the linuxthreads port used to
> beat the heck out of the uthread code.  This is no longer
> true.  Most tests show them about equal, except that uthread
> context switches are now much faster than the linuxthreads code,
> as they should be (before March 22 uthread was slower).



Date:      Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:11:30 -0800 (PST)
From:      John Birrell <jb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   cvs commit: src/include pthread.h pthread_np.h
Message-ID:  <199903230511.VAA13715@freefall.freebsd.org>

jb          1999/03/22 21:11:30 PST

  Modified files:
    include              pthread.h pthread_np.h 
  Log:
    o Runnable threads are now maintained in priority queues.  The
      implementation requires two things:
  
        1.) The priority queues must be protected during insertion
            and removal of threads.  Since the kernel scheduler
            must modify the priority queues, a spinlock for
            protection cannot be used.   The functions
            _thread_kern_sched_defer() and _thread_kern_sched_undefer()
            were added to {un}defer kernel scheduler activation.
  
        2.) A thread (active) priority change can be performed only
            when the thread is removed from the priority queue.  The
            implementation uses a threads active priority when
            inserting it into the queue.
  
      A by-product is that thread switches are much faster.  A
      separate queue is used for waiting and/or blocked threads,
      and it is searched at most 2 times in the kernel scheduler
      when there are active threads.  It should be possible to
      reduce this to once by combining polling of threads waiting
      on I/O with the loop that looks for timed out threads and
      the minimum timeout value.
  
    o Functions to defer kernel scheduler activation were added.  These
      are _thread_kern_sched_defer() and _thread_kern_sched_undefer()
      and may be called recursively.  These routines do not block the
      scheduling signal, but latch its occurrence.  The signal handler
      will not call the kernel scheduler when the running thread has
      deferred scheduling, but it will be called when running thread
      undefers scheduling.
  
    o Added support for _POSIX_THREAD_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING.  All the
      POSIX routines required by this should now be implemented.
      One note, SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_FIFO, and SCHED_RR are required
      to be defined by including pthread.h.  These defines are currently
      in sched.h.  I modified pthread.h to include sched.h but don't
      know if this is the proper thing to do.
  
    o Added support for priority protection and inheritence mutexes.
      This allows definition of _POSIX_THREAD_PRIO_PROTECT and
      _POSIX_THREAD_PRIO_INHERIT.
  
    o Added additional error checks required by POSIX for mutexes and
      condition variables.
  
    o Provided a wrapper for sigpending which is marked as a hidden
      syscall.
  
    o Added a non-portable function as a debugging aid to allow an
      application to monitor thread context switches.  An application
      can install a routine that gets called everytime a thread
      (explicitly created by the application) gets context switched.
      The routine gets passed the pthread IDs of the threads that are
      being switched in and out.  I found this useful, but we can
      get rid of it if you want.
  
  Submitted by: Dan Eischen <eischen@vigrid.com>
  
  Revision  Changes    Path
  1.11      +71 -36    src/include/pthread.h
  1.6       +7 -0      src/include/pthread_np.h


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