Re: [9fans] vfork and paging

["rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

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The acme paper talks about this a little.  Our threads are really just
user-level coroutines.  Their utility is that schedulding is easy to
understand: thread switching will occur only at communication points.
This means that no interlocking of data structures is required between
threads in the same process, and it's easy to write applications (like
acme) that use processes to gather I/O and send the data to a single
central process composed of lots of threads.  The total amount of
locking, and potential for concurrency bugs, is greatly reduced.

-rob


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From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] vfork and paging
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 07:34:06 -0600 (MDT)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0110020732590.26669-100000@snaresland.acl.lanl.gov>

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Boyd Roberts wrote:

> > Our approach was different, as Plan 9 users will appreciate.
> > Processes, rather than being a scourge to be avoided or
> > perhaps hidden behind an advertising adjective, are the
> > solution to many a systems problem and should be embraced.
>
> couldn't agree more.

I always thought this made sense too. I always wondered though why Alef
had threads. And who's using the thread library?

ron