Re: Good point of Linux over Windows NT

yuri mironoff (yuri@rgti.com)
Wed, 22 Jan 1997 13:10:00 -0500 (EST)


On Wed, 22 Jan 1997, Mark H. Wood wrote:

> Since the guts of NT are basically VMS warmed over (hmmm, that would make
> it RSX11M mk III), "asynchronous I/O" probably means the ability to
> request that the kernel start an I/O and send a signal when it is
> complete. Meanwhile the user process goes on doing other stuff.
> Traditionally Unix-like systems do this by forking. Linux can do better
> than that, with threads. (VMS I/O forking is a special case of
> multithreading.) So probably the only thing that is missing is some
> syntactic sugar to package the I/O thread(s) conveniently.
>
> Did I get it right?
>

Not quite, the returning AST under VMS interrupts the "parent" process
at a previously provided handler function. I'm not sure thats possible
under the current thread inplementations.

Y.