Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 02:41:16 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com> To: jasone@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Threads and my new job. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9911240230070.11412-100000@current1.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <19991122185220.D301@sturm.canonware.com>
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On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Jason Evans wrote: > Walnut Creek has hired me as a full time employee to work primarily on > improving and expanding FreeBSD's threads support. This is very exciting > to me, and I hope my work will be of benefit the FreeBSD community. Great. co-incidentally Terry tells me that at freeBSDcon someone told him that Microsoft hsa hired 2 ace programmers to add threads to freeBSD for some reason. He is adamant that it was microsoft, but can't remember whether it was Link-Exchange or Hotmail.. Paul at hotmails says "hey, not us" so maybe it's the other lot. (or maybe Terry thought it was Microsoft but it was apple or someone) Though the stated reason was to move som large package to NT-style threads under BSD and then 'jump' it over to NT. > > There is a lot of work to be done in order to make FreeBSD's threads > support truly excellent, and it will take more than just me working on it. > Fortunately, there are a number of other people also interested in > improving threads support, and as work progresses, I expect this will very > much be a group effort. > > Some very fruitful long-range architecture discussions have been taking > place on the -arch mailing list, and discussion will likely continue there > for some time as design decisions are hashed out. If you are interested in > participating in the design discussion, please subscribe to -arch (if you > haven't already), read the -arch archives for the past couple of weeks to > bring yourself up to speed on what has been discussed so far, read some of > the more pertinent references listed throughout the discussion, then jump > in. The signal-to-noise ratio on -arch is exceptionally high; please do > your part in keeping it that way. thanks for the plug.. > > What am I going to do? My first mandate is to round out the edges of our > current libc_r and to bring it closer to standards compliance before 4.0. > Specifically, I know that the following work is necessary: > > *) Address and close approximately 20 PRs. The list of PRs I know about > is: i386/7426, bin/7587, misc/8202, bin/8281, kern/8729, misc/9778, > misc/9903, misc/10599, bin/10992, kern/11982, kern/11984, bin/13008, > misc/13117, kern/13644, misc/14264, i386/14383, kern/14685, and > docs/14858. If there are other PRs that I didn't list that are directly > related to threads, please let me know about them in private email so > that I can keep track of them. Jolly good idea. can you buy the posix standard on CD and stick it in a drive at WC so we can read the official specs? (at least from Freefall) > > *) Signal delivery fixes. I think Daniel Eischen has already taken care of > this. > > *) Lacking interfaces, such as pthread_cancel() (mentioned specifically in > PR bin/7587) need to be implemented. > > *) Make a real libpthread, rather than relying on the -pthread linker > magic. This is high on Daniel Eischen's wish list, so maybe he already > has something in the works. =) > > If you know of other outstanding issues that have a prayer of being > addressed before 4.0 ships, please speak up. This is good stuff. I am trying to get ahead of this point by trying to work out the kernel support needed to do teh next step which is threading capable of utilising SMP but with good performance still. Julian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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