Re: [patch] SMP alternatives

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>]

On 11/23/05, Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> wrote:
> Those are the wrong ways of doing this in userspace.  There are right
> ways.  For instance, tag the binary at link time "single-threaded".

This works and the system is designed this way.  But it's unlikely
that any distribution will ship code like this since the maintenance
is to problematic.


> Glibc does not do this to the best of my knowledge.  It does select
> different code paths in various places based on the presence of
> multiple threads, but that's for cancellation, not for locking.

Wrong.  Linus is right, we jump over lock prefix.  After a lot of
benchmarking I found this to be the fastest was and the Intel people
seemed to agree.


> This is also a trivially solvable problem in userspace; you make the
> dynamic linker enforce consistency of the tags.

This would require that potentially every single DSO is duplicated as
threaded and non-threaded.  If you like this you might as well enter
the horror world of BSD with their libc_r.  This will never fly, the
support costs are too high.


> The number of userspace libraries that use atomic operations is, in
> practice, quite small.

It really not and the number using them is growing.

-- 
➧ Ulrich Drepper ➧ Red Hat, Inc. ➧ 444 Castro St ➧ Mountain View, CA ❖