What new system calls do you want in BSD?

Larry McVoy lm at snafu.Sun.COM
Thu Feb 8 16:36:09 AEST 1990


In article <2212.21:08:11 at stealth.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>In article <7848 at pt.cs.cmu.edu> dstewart at fas.ri.cmu.edu (David B Stewart) writes:
>> How about implementing good ol' semaphores, with a much simpler interface
>> than Sys V.
>
>Actually, I just built a simple threads library on top of my signal
>library. Everything is shared. You get threadfork(), threadexit(),
>threadup() and threaddown() for semaphores, and a few other calls.
>
>It ain't Mach but it works.
>
>---Dan

Yeah, I did the same thing once for kicks.  It's cute, but essentially useless.
You don't have threadkill() or threadsignal(), but you do have 
block_all_threads() in the form of read(), write(), select(), and any other
system call that can block().

Bottom line: threads without kernel support are largely useless.
---
What I say is my opinion.  I am not paid to speak for Sun, I'm paid to hack.
    Besides, I frequently read news when I'm drjhgunghc, err, um, drunk.
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm at sun.com



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