Native Threads in the RTS

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2002 12:23:06 +0100
Sven Panne <Sven.Panne@informatik.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
> Nevertheless, you make a good point: Better support for "real"
> multi-threading is definitely an area where I'd like to see some
> improvement for the next non-patchlevel release of GHC. I'm still
> unconvinced that the current optional RTS support for mixed
> green/native threads is the right way to go. It looks to me like a
> workaround for poor OS support for really lightweight threads.

Which of course has been improving greatly recently - on Linux at least.
The 2.6 kernel will apparently have threading on par with Solaris. In
fact, the next Linux pthreads library looks as though it will be based
on a 1:1 model rather than a M:N model because it is simpler and (with
the recent threading improvements) performs better.

So that means that all of ghc's major platforms (Solaris, Linux, Win32)
will have good OS thread support in the near future.

Duncan