Re: Threads are processes that share more

From: Larry McVoy (lm@bitmover.com)
Date: Sun Jun 24 2001 - 18:47:29 EST


On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 01:10:31AM +0200, J . A . Magallon wrote:
>
> On 20010621 Stephen Satchell wrote:
> >
> >By the way, I'm surprised no one has mentioned that a synonym for "thread"
> >is "lightweight process".
> >
>
> In linux. Perhaps this the fault.
> In IRIX, you have sprocs and threads. sprocs have independent pids and you
> can control what you share (mappings, fd table...). Threads group under
> same pid.

I think that's accurate.

> Linux chose the sproc way...

That's not accurate. The Linux way is an infinitely nicer architecture.
For each thing that is shareable you have code like

        vm_fork(... flags)
        {
                if (flags & VM_SHARE) return;
                do the work to fork the data structure
        }

In other words, it's designed to be shared. The IRIX stuff is disgusting,
you really don't want anything to do with sproc(). It _sounds_ like they
are the same but they aren't - for example, with sproc you get your very
own TLB miss handler. Doesn't that sound special?

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jun 30 2001 - 21:00:10 EST