Re: threaded FS-drivers

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
2 Feb 1998 22:37:53 GMT


Followup to: <199802020853.JAA00234@mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de>
By author: Martin von Loewis <martin@mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> > Is there any point to using threaded FS drivers? or threaded physical
> > hardware drivers?
>
> The Linux file system drivers have been threaded for ages. Multiple
> processes can access different files in an overlapping fashion; while
> one process is waiting for a request to complete, the file system might
> already look into the request of another process.
>
> There are a few places where concurrent access is not desirable, Linux
> supports locks on the inode level and on the superblock level for
> these cases.
>

Well, there are two kinds of multithreading here. The Linux VFS, for
example, supports multiple processes inside the VFS, but only one of
them may execute at any time, i.e. only one *processor*.

-hpa

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