NetBSD Now Has Native pthreads!

jschauma writes, quoting the NetBSD changelog, was one of several people to point out that "Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers."

Comments

Re:Does this mean...?

[beholder77]

NetBSD has had SMP support for a few platforms in the -CURRENT branch for a while now (sparc, vax and alpha for sure).

Even with SMP support, I don't think you get a really high degree of concurrency unless you have a threading implementation that involves the kernel.

FreeBSD 4.x on a dual processor machine, for example, will take each process currently running, and assign it to a free CPU (either 0 or 1). This works great if you have more than one process running on your machine with a good division of labour (i.e. Apache + MySql).

However, there are times when you want your box to be dedicated to a single purpose like being a datbase server only. That database engine might be a single process application like Oracle, and was written to break it's own internal tasks off into threads.

A kernel thread implementation means you don't waste the second CPU of your SMP capable OS in this situation.

Way to go NetBSD team, for implementing this. I hope I get to see this in action in 1.7