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Date:      Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:25:17 -0500 (EST)
From:      Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD Posix threads
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.3.96.1000204121232.25825C-100000@sol.cs.binghamton.edu>

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I have searched the archive for a while and still have some confusions
about this subjects:

(1) Some people say "For I/O bound activity, kernel threads are a really
bad idea".  But I read the following passage from else where: 

Kernel threads perform better in I/O-intensive applications because system
call can be blocking for kernel threads (so there is only one 
user-to-kernel and kernel-to-user transition per I/O operation rather than
two).

So which one is the correct answer?  I know there is only userland thread
in FreeBSD, but I would like to know the answer.

(2) User threads are supposed to be faster than kernel threads in context
switch.  But since we poll devices during each context switch, it is
actually slower (poll() is the extra system call).  Is this correct?

(3) Can I do cooperative thread scheduling on FreeBSD?  I guess the
constant SCHED_RR (round robin) means preemptive.  How about SCHED_FIFO
and SCHED_OTHER defined in posix4/sched.h?  Can I choose from them?  In
the case of SCHED_RR, I still do part of scheduling by routines like
yield(), cond_signal().  Am I right? 

Any help is appreciated.

-Zhihui




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