On Sun, Nov 10, 2002, Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote about "RE: I have 2 spare CPU's (maybe not)":
> As much as I know, Linux doesn't really excells in multi-threading (anyone -
> please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not very familiar on that issue)..
>
> You CAN however do some testing with the latest multi-threading implementation
> with the work that Red Hat is doing and sponsoring. You'll need RedHat 8.0 for
> that (you can read about it on the Linux kernel mailing list)..
SMPs are already supported very well in Linux, especially in kernel 2.4
where the kernel's (as opposed to user processes') ability to use several
CPUs concurrently was improved.
The new multi-threading implementations (one of them was written by people
at Redhat, like you said) and related changes in Kernel 2.5.* and 2.4.19 aim
at 3 things:
1. Improving scalability: letting you run 10,000 threads concurrently, and
starting and deleting 100,000 threads per second, and things like that,
which I wonder if anyone really needs.
2. Lowering latency: making locks quicker (especially in the common case
where the locks are not contended), thread creation/deletion quicker,
etc.
3. Improving standard compliance; E.g., the fact that in Linuxthreads
getpid() returns a different number for each thread is against the
POSIX standard.
None of these changes should be relevant to home users, so don't hold your
breath for the new thread implementations: unless you're a suphisticated
multithread programmer, or trying to push the performance envelope on
some application with some 1000 concurrent threads (e.g., Java ;)), you
won't see any difference.
--
Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Nov 10 2002, 5 Kislev 5763
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |How's he gonna read that magazine rolled
http://nadav.harel.org.il |up like that? What the ... - a fly.
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