[kaffe] native threads

[Godmar Back]

> 
> On Feb 12, 1999, "Enno Rehling" <enno at uni-paderborn.de> wrote:
> 
> > I'm working with Kaffe under Linux/x86. I was wondering if there's
> > an implementation for Kaffe's threads that uses pthreads, or if
> > anyone is working on other threading systems right now.
> 
> Godmar has started working on it, check the current CVS tree,
> threading system linux-threads.  But beware, it's not supposed to work
> yet.
> 
> > Also, how does Kaffe perform on an SMP versus a single-processor
> > machine?  The jthreads will obviously make use of only one
> > processor, how do I get Kaffe to use the other ones?
> 
> Complete linux-threads :-)
> 

The linux-threads that's in the CVS tree passes most single-threaded tests.
It still fails others, either because of missing functionality (easy to add)
or because of race conditions.  I tested it on an SMP, other people have
reported slightly fewer failures on a uniprocessor machine.

The intricacies have to do with stopping/resuming the world for gc,
handling thread.stop and interruptable I/O.  

In any event, I won't have the time to guarantee that this work will be
completed any time soon: anybody who wants to grab it, feel free to do so.
Linux's gdb is pretty okay and support linux-threads; this way, it's easy
to get backtraces.  You can use what's already in the CVS tree, or start
over.  Note that you must implement the jthread interface.

	- Godmar