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NetBSD Now Has Native pthreads!

Posted by timothy on from the restless-threads-are-next dept.

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."

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does this mean...? by beholder77 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
  2. Re:Does this mean...? by orangesquid · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's more important, NetBSD can now support pcloth natively, which means pclothes! And soon, pfashion! They're well on their way to stardom... as soon as NetBSD/catwalk takes off, we'll start seeing ports to The Limited, The Gap, Sears, J. C. Penney's, and T. J. Maxx... Boy, I can't wait for NetBSD/hottopic---I'll about that daemon about metal spikes yet!

    In other news, Fig Leaf Linux Corp.'s stocks took a major dive, while Thimble+Needle Webhosting Co. skyrocketed. Red Hat Linux is holding steady, although this may change with conditions in the felt market.

    --
    --TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive