{rd,wr}unique palcode insns

Richard Henderson (richard@atheist.tamu.edu)
Tue, 10 Sep 1996 17:52:06 -0500 (CDT)


Does anyone know what the rdunique/wrunique unprivileged PALcode
traps are for? Do they, as they appear, allow one value to be stored
per-thread? How are they used in DEC Unix? What kind of performance
hit do I take trapping to PALcode?

I ask because I was thinking of changing the LinuxThreads code to use
this for its thread id, rather than doing some screwy stack pointer
lookup nonsense as is necessary for other platforms.

Anyone see a problem with this?

r~