Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 18 Aug 1999 13:19:45 +1000 | From | Nathan Hand <> | Subject | Re: Threads in linux. |
| |
On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 01:53:21PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Carlos Costa Portela wrote: > > > Hello all! > > > > This morning I went to a work-interview. Unfortunately, in that company > > they use WinNT. But, well, they had a good opinion about linux, blah, > > blah, blah... > > > > But the director says me that linux doesn't implement threads, is this > > true?. He said that threads in linux are implemented by a library, not at > > kernel-level. > > > > If you can give me more info, please let me know. > > From my understanding, most of the threading work is implemented in > either glibc2 or linux-threads, w/ some kernel-level hooks (clone() I think?).
No, Linux 2.x implements threads entirely in the kernel. The userspace library merely provides a POSIX API to the kernel interface (clone).
> Now, from my experiance linux handles threads pretty nicely, and from > what I've seen according to POSIX semantics to boot. Linux, and unix, already > handles multiple processes at a time, so the idea is, what's a thread but > another process? (I know I'm going to get flamed for this by SOMEONE), so > that's the way Linux handles it. Two threads in a running program are just > simply two processes that share some info, similar to fork'ed processes, but > not quite. ;) > > Anyhow, that's how I understand it, and I've yet to run into any > problems or drawbacks in the linux thread implementation compared to other > OS's (Solaris being one, NT another) that have threads at 'kernel-level'.
Linux's implementation is by far the most elegant.
-- Nathan Hand - Chirp Web Design - http://www.chirp.com.au/ - $e^{i\pi}+1 = 0$ Phone: +61 2 6230 1871 Fax: +61 2 6230 1515 E-mail: nathanh@chirp.com.au
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |