Re: [patch 00/13] Syslets, "Threadlets", generic AIO support, v3

Ingo Molnar
2007-02-21T23:09:17Z

* Michael K. Edwards <medwards.linux@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) Documentation of what you can and can't do safely from a threadlet,
> given that it runs in an unknown thread context;

you can do just about anything from a threadlet, using bog standard
procedural programming. (Certain system-calls are excluded at the moment
out of caution - but i'll probably lift restrictions like sys_clone()
use because sys_clone() can be done safely from a threadlet.)

The code must be thread-safe, because the kernel can move execution to a
new thread anytime and then it will execute in parallel with the main
thread. There's no other requirement.

Wrt. performance, one good model is to run request-alike functionality
from a threadlet, to maximize parallelism.

ingo