Re: Thread deficiencies
Alan,
No question that POSIX.4 is heap of stinking shit. The problem is that
it's a *standardized* heap of stinking shit, and application writers
want to be able to cleanly port their programs from other Unices to
Linux.
The question is, how do we standardize threading behaviour? Do we tell
Independent Software Vendors, so sorry, unlike every other Unix system
on the planet, you have to use clone() and not the standardized POSIX
interfaces. Now go away and stop bothering us? The problem is, they
may do exactly that.
Do we say that we "almost but not quite" implement POSIX.4, and then
list all of the ways that we don't quite match the spec? That won't
make us a lot of friends in the application developer world (who will
ask why can't we support all of POSIX.4), but it's at least honest.
The final approach is to do the latter, but then start thinking about
what are the minimal kernel hooks necessary so that libpthreads can do
something more like what POSIX.4 compliant applications expect. hpa has
been thinking about this, and hopefully we'll be able to pursuade Linus
that some patches to the kernel so that we can say that we are POSIX.4
(or rather POSIX.1b) compliant, and can actually pass POSIX.1b
conformance test suites.
- Ted
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