Re: [patch] SMP alternatives

[Jeff Garzik]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The third alternative is to know at link-time that the process never does 
> anything threaded, but that needs more developer attention and 
> non-standard setups, and you _will_ get it wrong (some library will create 
> some thread without the developer even realizing). It also has the 
> duplicated library overhead (but at least now the duplication is just 
> twice, not "each process duplicates its own private pointer")

Small data point:  In a lot of gcc-related build processes, the 
configure/makefile junk passes '-pthread' to the compiler/linker.

So a lot of programs in Linux distros are already built this way.  The 
bigger problem is with libraries, which cannot know ahead of time 
whether the app is threaded or not, and therefore must assume threaded.

A few libs do things like glibc, others (like GLib) have an explicit 
mylib_thread_init() called at program startup.

	Jeff


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