Re: kernel thread support - LWP's

Janos Farkas (chexum@shadow.banki.hu)
Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:03:03 +0200


On 1999-07-15 at 00:44:44, Mike Shaver wrote:
> _What_ do you mean, beyond simply making CLONE_PID work?

I'm wondering about that too; but it's hard to communicate about threads
between people who know only about the Linux clone() model (i.e. me:),
and who wants something other unspecified thing; it makes me think
wanting that "other" thing is simply just a byproduct of not knowing
"our" model well enough. But of course, I'm not into threads anyway,
and want to purge away my ignorancy :)

To recap:

On 1999-07-15 at 11:56:55, Darren Reed wrote:
> Are there plans in the near future to support proper LWP's in the Linux
> kernel ? By this I mean multiple threads of execution within the same
> process id, not multiple processes sharing the same VM, etc....

multiple processes sharing the same VM are exactly the most light-weight
possible (_LW_P), because there isn't (or shouldn't) be MM-specific cost
between switching them (flushing TLB's, MMU contexts, etc), since they
share the same VM. So, what's the problem apart from not sharing the
PID (which I don't really care about)? That the kernel switches the
other CPU context too (i.e. registers)? Or why is it different from
that other something which is so important? :)

Janos

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