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Date:      Mon, 7 Dec 1998 22:19:57 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        marcelk@stack.nl (Marcel van Kervinck)
Cc:        smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Pthreads and SMP
Message-ID:  <199812072219.PAA16916@usr06.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <19981206172549.A11335@unox.student.tue.nl> from "Marcel van Kervinck" at Dec 6, 98 05:25:49 pm

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> Perhaps I've missed something obvious  But: it seems to me that a process
> that uses multiple threads doesn't spread them over more processors?

That is correct.  The threads are user space threads, which execute in
a single process context.

> I tried on a dual PII, running fbsd 3.0, and a program that simply did
> a few pthread_create() calls.

There are L1 and L2 cache coherency issues that impact bus based
arbitration and invalidation bottlenecks, there are scheduler
issues (both user and kernel space), there are stack issues, there
are address space issues, memory model issues, and a slew more
issues.

These problems are not as trivially solvable, as the poor Linux and
SVR4 kernel threading implementations, or the EGCS thread support
assumptions would have you believe.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.

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