Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 7 Aug 1996 20:45:04 -0400 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: proc fs and shared pids |
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From: peter@ifm.liu.se (Peter Eriksson) Date: 7 Aug 1996 15:12:21 GMT
I see one problem with this 16bit "thread-ID" idea - it's not impossible one would need more than 65536 concurrent threads,=20 and what would one do then? Let's try to avoid stepping into the 640KB-is-more-than-anyone-would-ever-need trap again...
I'm sure you can construct a proof-by-counter example that's it's possible that a program could actually try to create 65536 concurrent threads. I'd really like to see, however, an example of when you'd actually really want to *use* 65336 threads. People have raised the example of transputers where you have more than 64k computers --- however, in these cases, you *won't* be sharing memory, so you wouldn't be using separate threads anyway. (The thought of trying to do memory cache coherency checking across 64k processor makes me shiver....)
I can think of bad design decisions that result in needing more than 64k threads; what I'd like to see is a legitimate example which doesn't involve a bad design decision. :-)
- Ted
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