On 5 May 2010 01:07, Geoff <g...@oat.com> wrote: > Juan Miscaro <jmisc...@gmail.com> wrote on Tue, 4 May 2010 22:15:09 -0400 > >>What is the current state of multiprocessing and multithreading in >>OpenBSD? Also, what applications are multithreaded? In particular, >>someone told me that pf is "garbage" because it is not multithreaded? >>What truth is there to this? Under what kind of load would an OpenBSD >>firewall's performance suffer due to it being non-multithreaded? > > Ha. Note: bsd.mp > > Search the misc archives for "threaded sshd". > > PF is interrupt-driven inside the kernel and thus faster than any > threaded program. > > Take whoever told you that load of garbled nonsense and push him > or her into a midden-heap. That's where it belongs. > Threads were invented as a very bad workaround for slow context > switching on ancient hardware using primitive OS versions.
Actually I believe it's more of a workaround for poor IPC techniques, not slow context switching (you still have context switching among processes). > The people who invented them said they were bad. > Any teacher or programmer who says otherwise is ignorant. > There's a paper from Berkeley showing how a threaded program can > never be fully debugged and should be presumed to be broken, > probably fatally broken.
