On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 09:33:36AM +0100, Jaromír Dolecek wrote:
> So far, I've been only aware of occasional problems with Linux
> threaded binaries, not with native ones.
> 
> Are NetBSD X libraries compiled as thread-safe ?

I think the "thread problems" to which Pållen referred stem from
the fact that we don't have preemptive pthreads. (This is what
breaks xmms too, btw... someone started to make it use cooperative
pthreads, but doesn't seem to have finished the job.)

Since Linux's threading is almost all pthreads these days, a lot of
Linux software presumes that both cooperative and preemptive threads
work, and use the version that's easier on the coder (preemptive,
for obvious reasons... think about it).

We have a mostly working pthreads implementation in pkgsrc somewhere
(devel/mit-pthreads is the one, I think), but it's not done, and
it's definitely not part of the OS.

I haven't bothered to download Tomasz's tarball (don't have a DVD
player in this aging ThinkPad, my only i386 machine), but this reeks
of preemptive pthreads, the code for which will either need to be
made to work with our mit-pthreads (subtly different from Linux's
idea of what a pthreads library should be, if memory serves) or
rewritten using cooperative pthreads.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net