Subject: Re: libpthread
To: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
From: Antti Kantee <pooka@cs.hut.fi>
List: tech-kern
Date: 07/02/2003 16:41:18
(developing the bad habit of actually reading some mail instead of
deleting it)

On Sun Jun 22 2003 at 15:30:44 +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 02:29:11PM +0200, Lars Heidieker wrote:
> > Probably it would be good idea to develop a 1:1 lib as well its much
> > simpler
> > and let the user choose which one to use
> 
> Well, as Jason already said: porting the linux lib is no big deal.
> Alternatively, feel free to write one and offer the code.

Well, the company I work for wrote an own 1:1 pthread library for FreeBSD,
since at the time when it was written only a userspace threading library
existed.  It's not a very complex piece of work and is lacking some of
the standard features, but does the job nicely for most cases and is in
use in several products.

I ported NetBSD to it last summer.  It was mainly a question of adding
some flags to fork1().  I didn't run it very much, but just tested that
it worked and scaled for at least two threads on SMP x86.

As I recall hearing, it was made ABI-compatible with some FreeBSD version,
and for example KDE ran flawlessly if it was used as a drop-in replacement
for the standard FreeBSD libc_r.

Last summer there was talk about releasing it to the public, but that
talk was forgotten as nathanw-sa was nearing completion.  The only thing
it would require would be a somewhat extensive cleanup of the code,
which would in turn require someone to have time, which would naturally
require some universal truths to be proven incorrect...

-- 
Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi>                     Of course he runs NetBSD
http://www.iki.fi/pooka/                          http://www.NetBSD.org/
                 "connoisseurs do not chill their malts."