Re: just checked in

[Zack Weinberg <zack@rabi.phys.columbia.edu>]

On Sun, 6 Sep 1998 18:38:47 -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
>> Query - would it help this transition if I pulled the
>> atomic-operations code and the semaphore code out of linuxthreads and
>> made them generic to each processor?  This is something I've been
>> considering for awhile.
>
>Uh, maybe, probably, but it's sort of a drop in the bucket.
>What code exactly do you mean?

Well, most of linuxthreads isn't really that Linux specific.  It
appears to me that the primitives it uses have direct equivalents on
the mach side of things.  I don't think it would be terribly hard to
move the linux-specific code out to separate files, selected with
sysdeps in the usual way, and then you'd just have to write
Mach-specific code and it (should) work.

I mentioned the semaphore code because it's sort of separate from the
rest of the library.  It has an unhealthy dependence on the manager
thread but that can be removed (which would be good anyway for
performance reasons).  There's atomic-operations code scattered all
over libc, and unifying it would be a good idea in any case.  If those
were split out the remaining code would be much more manageable.

zw