Re: unofficial prerelease 1.1.3.2 for testing

[Clarence Dang <dang@kde.org>]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002 02:03, Stas Sergeev wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Bart Oldeman wrote:
> > Please test the improved joystick support from Clarence Dang: it looks
> > very nice, but I don't have a joystick. He claims it works faster if
> > you enable pthreads (see compiletime-settings), but I experienced DPMI
> > crashes that way (DJGPP gcc immediately nukes DOSEMU), so left that out
> > by default. Can anyone confirm?
>
> Well, as I don't have a joystick, I
> can only confirm that dosemu doesn't
> even start on my machine when I enable
> pthreads. No problems with them disabled
> though.
>
Hi everyone,

I just ran the joystick code (with pthreads) on a little-used machine and it 
froze...the logs report that it got a load average of 63 within 1 second of 
starting DOSEMU.  Later examination showed that it was randomly spawning new 
threads uncontrollably!  On another machine, it works fine...

So, just to be safe, you should probably turn off pthreads (as Bart Oldeman 
and Stas Sergeev have pointed out).  I'm curious though as to why pthreads 
can cause so much trouble?

The performance increase with pthreads on with joystick support is not 
significant at all on my machine (Pentium II) but is largely theoretical.

Thanks!
Clarence