On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 01:35:02PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote: > On 2018-07-19 15:17:26 -0500, Nico Williams wrote: > > You can create that thread with a really small stack given that its only > > purpose is to do this error reporting and exit. > > You still have a full kernel process backing it, which is *FAR* from > free. [...]
It's not that big. Its stack is small. > [...] And we'd enough infrastructure to setup threads with small stacks > on a number of platforms. Portability is actually the problem here, yes. But you could enable the async-signal-safe thread path in some platforms and not others, and you'd still be improving things. > > Running a thread that does only this does not impact the rest of the > > code in the backend at all -- it's not "threading" the backend. > > It actually does. Without passing thread related flags to the compiler, > which you need to do for correctness, the compiler and libraries are > free to use faster non-threadsafe implementations. That's build goop, but there's no need to add mutexes or whatever elsewhere. Nico --
