Re: mmap() versus read()

Stephen Williams (steve@icarus.icarus.com)
Sun, 15 Mar 1998 10:02:50 -0800

pedward@sun4.apsoft.com said:
> Solaris has diverged from the traditional way of making unix, and
> (AFAIK) runs as a process unto itself. It does not have any real
> concept of a "sleep", but rather has a "kernel thread" busy wait
> until the timer runs out. In this context, a kernel thread is a
> thread of execution which runs inside the kernel, independent of a
> user process.

I have written drivers for Solaris 2.4, and somehow I didn't get this
perception. Yes, you can use thread-like synchronization primitives
but it was really executing in a process context.

Of course, when there are multiple CPUs, it is true (I think) that
there might be two processes running in kernel mode, which appear in
that context to be kernel threads since their address space is shared.

-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve@icarus.com              But I have promises to keep,
steve@picturel.com            and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."






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