More whining re glibc from
http://www.tenslashsix.com/index.php (2004-06-30 blog entry)
"The fact of the matter is this is a result of basically one thing: glibc folks deciding that releases aren’t worth while and that distros should just take snapshots at their leisure. People talk about linux not being a good target becomes it’s hard to target, compared to win32, and they couldn’t be more right. We can’t even get a LIBC that is f*cking standard across each distros because the glibc authors can’t be bothered to do releases. I’ve heard that they will be back to making releases again soon. I can only hope this is the case. Regardless the big guys are gonna have a patched to h*ll glibc, so it’s not like it’s gonna matter."
But here's the question, why can't fork(), which makes use of the same clone() system call that NPTL ultimately does, not be able to scale up just as dramatically as the much-hyped, yet maddeningly unavailable, NPTL. After all:
1. It is not the /RedHat-hostaged/ glibc's pthreads implementation that is giving us these threads by the tens of thousands scalability, it's the *kernel* (as in Linux and not GNU), correct? Pthreads' API is generally seen as being as horrible and full of compromises anyway. See http://www-124.ibm.com/pthreads/ and digest the discussion at http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20000911_84.html#1
2. "Threads are evil." http://threading.2038bug.com/index.html
3. Normal processes on Linux are far less heavyweight vis-a-vis threads as they were on Unix. From http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-sc5.html :
"In many, many situations, the best way to multi-task an application is to decompose it into collaborating /processes/ rather than /threads/. Programmers commonly resist this reality. One reason is history: processes used to be far "heavier" than threads, and, under most flavors of Windows, still are. With modern Linux, though, a context switch between distinct processes might take only 15% more time than the corresponding context switch between same-process threads. What you gain for that cost in time is a *far better understood and more robust programming model*. Many programmers can safely write independent processes. Relatively few are safe with threads."
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