Re: threading news

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:22:40 +0200
Felix von Leitner <[email protected]> wrote:

> I just checked in some threading code and probably broke everything.
> The new code supports thread local storage (so far only tested on i386
> and amd64), and uses the TLS mechanism to avoid the costly thread self
> discovery that the code was doing until now (call getpid and then search
> a data structure).  If the TLS setup fails (on i386 if you use an old
> kernel, presumably), then the code still falls back to the old search
> code.

Really good news so far.

> Now, the question is: is there even a target audience for using
> threading with dietlibc on kernels older than 2.6?  Should we maintain
> the old horrible threading library or abandon it altogether for a
> rewrite supporting all the shiny scalability features from kernel 2.6
> onwards?  That would clean up things considerably and reduce code size
> dramatically, too.

For me it is perfectly OK to drop support for older kernels.

> Please note that thread local storage only works for static binaries.

Does this mean, support for dynamic (threaded) binaries completely goes away?
Or will the fallback mechanism takes place here?

> I'm NEVER going to implement that.  If you need TLS and shared libraries,
> use glibc. :-)

Maybe someone else can do that. (?)

Gernot

-- 
Kürzlich war ich der Meinung nicht immer recht zu haben.
Ich hatte mich geirrt...