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Date:      Wed, 5 Jul 2006 10:02:39 +0100 (BST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        freebsd-threads@freebsd.org, Daniel Eischen <deischen@freebsd.org>, kmacy@fsmware.com, David Xu <davidxu@freebsd.org>, threads@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Strawman proposal: making libthr default thread implementation?
Message-ID:  <20060705095450.O64340@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <44AB4C22.3030109@elischer.org>
References:  <20060703101554.Q26325@fledge.watson.org> <200607042204.52572.davidxu@freebsd.org> <44AAC47F.2040508@elischer.org> <200607041819.05510.peter@wemm.org> <b1fa29170607042101q4a1204c7o942d83edcec71eb7@mail.gmail.com> <44AB4C22.3030109@elischer.org>

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On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Julian Elischer wrote:

> If it come to pass that M:N threads are judged to be "unsuitable" then that 
> is a decision that I can live with, but never be let it be said that I 
> walled FreeBSD in to only having the option of 1:1 threads.

Given that I have serious hindsight accuracy problems, I won't even talk about 
my foresight issues. :-)  I think we shouldn't nail the KSE coffin closed just 
yet -- as Peter has already said, it's one thing to do a skunkworks hack of 
what might eventually be used, but it's quite another to show that the 
perceived benefit maps into real world benefit.  I'd like to see that clearly 
shown before we do anything drastic.  In particular, we need to show that the 
benefit is there for more than just a few poorly written benchmarks, but also 
for a range of real-world workloads, and that the scheduler simplifications 
pay off in terms of both code complexity and our ability to optimize.  I also 
want to make sure we understand some of the artifacts better: the benefit of 
reducing per-process lock contention is significant, and I'm interested in 
understanding where on the workload spectrum the benefits of 1:1 outweight the 
benefits of M:N a bit better.  Is my interpretation that this is M:N providing 
better kernel workload management correct, or is it an artifact of scheduler 
behavior?  And, where future hardware and application trends will push 
workload behavior with respect to the optimizations we already have, not to 
mention the ones we are considering.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge



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