Re: Glibc-based Debian GNU/KNetBSD

[Perry E.Metzger <perry@piermont.com>]

Robert Millan <zeratul2@wanadoo.es> writes:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 09:46:19PM -0500, Perry E.Metzger wrote:
>> IMHO, the amount of work involved in making glibc stably work with
>> scheduler activations is likely prohibitive. You'll be chasing
>> problems in the library forever.
>
> First we'll merge the patchset in upstream. Then we'll have problems for a
> while, similarly to those the GNU/Hurd port has fixing Glibc every time it
> breaks for them.
>
> But unlike GNU/Hurd, at some point upstream developers will install GNU/K*BSD
> themselves and maintain it for us.

If you mean that the NetBSD folks are going to abandon their libc,
which is really nice to work with, I think you're mistaken. It is
unlikely that they're ever going to do that. ("They" includes me,
fyi.) Because of that, you'll have to maintain patches to do the
scheduler activations dance forever. SA is probably the most
complicated way to do threads that's out there, so this will not, in
the end, be particularly pleasant.

If you had a list of functional deficiencies in the native libc,
though, it would probably be possible to re-implement them and fix
them in the native NetBSD libc. NetBSD would like to be maximally
compatible with third party apps, so we add stuff we need all the time
and are happy to do it. It would also likely be far less work to add a
few dozen new functions to libc than for you to re-implement the
userland SA framework and debug it.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com