Re: Alan Cox quote?

Larry McVoy
2001-06-19T18:50:06Z

On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 08:01:00PM +0200, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> The funny thing here, Larry, is that to most people (who aren't OS gurus),
> Linux' clone or Plan 9's rfork *are* threads.
>
> I certainly agree that you don't necessarily need two different kernel-
> level kinds of things, but really, most of the time when people talk about
> threads

Great, then we are in violent agreement on the single abstraction.
On the second part, I stand by my previous statements that threads or
processes should be used sparingly.

All I'm doing is trying to counter all the "threads are great" hype.
This is a pretty intelligent pile of people but there are also a fair
number of people who read this list looking for nuggets of information.
If they walk away going "(a) Linux has a cool threading model, and
(b) I should only use threads if I absolutely have to do so and even
then if there are more than there are CPUs I'm probably making a
mistake", if they get that message, that's a good thing, IMHO.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm