Re: Alan Cox quote? (was: Re: accounting for threads)

Jonathan Lundell
2001-06-19T21:13:00Z

At 1:57 PM -0700 2001-06-19, David S. Miller wrote:
>So my basic point is that I don't want people to read what you said
>and believe "oh then the difference between threads vs. different
>processes under Solaris is due to Sparc hw architecture reasons
>instead of sw reasons" which simply isn't true.

Yeah, my observation wasn't central to the discussion, and the
overhead of SPARC register windows is probably more relevant to
user-level threads, not to mention small compared to IO.

It seems to me that the telling argument against threads has much
more to do with the potential complexity of the resulting code than
with after-all-minor performance considerations. If threads truly
gave one an elegant, fool-proof way to implement otherwise complex
applications, well, what are MIPS for, anyway?

I have a question, though. The SGI "state threads" mentioned earlier
use threads in a controlled way with a state-machine programming
model, which among other things has the potential to take advantage
of multiple processors. How does one otherwise take advantage of MP
with a state machine? Multiple processes and shared memory?

--
/Jonathan Lundell.