Re: Threading in linux

[Erik Mouw <mouw@nl.linux.org>]

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On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 12:08:40PM +0530, Rick Brown wrote:
> I read that the kernel does not differentiate between threads and
> processes.

Correct.

>  That means, we can say that on a Linux system, the
> threading is purely provided by user level thread libraries, right?

No. User level thread libraries are usually things like LWP (light
weight processes), that's not what the Linux kernel uses. The Linux
clone() system call is a superset of the standard Unix fork() system
call. With clone() you can tell what parent and child have to share. A
thread is just an execution context that shares the protection context
with its parent.

> So as long as relevant system calls do not change, it should be
> possible to run any threading library on any kernel? NPTL on 2.4?
> pthreads on 2.6?

Not sure about that. There were certainly issues, though I can't
remember exactly what.


Erik

- -- 
They're all fools. Don't worry. Darwin may be slow, but he'll
eventually get them. -- Matthew Lammers in alt.sysadmin.recovery
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