Native Threads in the RTS

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2002 12:23:06 +0100 Sven Panne 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.

On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 11:33:44AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 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.

1:1 threading is inferior by virtue of resource scalability on 32-bit
machines. This is not the final word.


Bill