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SubjectRe: Thread implementations...
David S. Miller writes:
> Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 11:37:28 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet-list-linux-kernel@arctic.org>
[...]
> Unix multiplexing facilities -- select and poll -- are wake-all
> primitives. When something happens, everything waiting is awakened
> and immediately starts fighting for something to do. What a waste.
> They make a lot of sense for processes though. On NT completion
> ports provide wake-one semantics... which are perfect for threads.
>
> Yes, this does in fact suck. However, the path to go down is not to
> expect the way select/poll work to change, rather look at other
> existing facilities or invent new ones which solve this problem.
> Too much user code exists which depends upon the wake-all semantics,
> so the only person to blame is whoever designed the behaviors of these
> unix operations to begin with ;-)

On the other hand you could say that the UNIX semantics are fine and
are quite scalable, provided you use them sensibly. Some of these
"problems" are due to applications not being properly thought out in
the first place. If for example you have N threads each polling a
chunk of FDs, things can run well, provided you don't have *each*
thread polling *all* FDs. Of course, you want to use poll(2) rather
than select(2), but other than that the point stands.

Regards,

Richard....

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