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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!worldnet.att.net!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.be.com!news1.crl.com!nntp.crl.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD (or something else?) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 14:22:44 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 35 Message-ID: <333EE7B4.237C228A@FreeBSD.org> References: <3337e3ad.1847437@news.sprynet.com> <5hbh2g$gah$1@kayrad.ziplink.net> <333990e3.2587820@news.sprynet.com> <5hlju0$ftk$1@news.belwue.de> <5hmlnk$c3m@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: Dong Lin <donglin@ix.netcom.com> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38081 Dong Lin wrote: > > In article <5hlju0$ftk$1@news.belwue.de>, > schweikh@rubin.noc.dfn.de (Jens Schweikhardt) wrote: > > ># What *significant* things can UNIX do that NT4 or 95 can't? > > You can't currently write multithreading applications on FreeBSD. Windows NT:microkernel vs. > FreeBSD's monolithic. That's all complete bollocks, unfortunately. For one thing, "mutlthreading" is something which can take place at two levels, the application layer (POSIX threads) and the kernel. You DO NOT NEED kernel threads to do effective multithreaded applications, just working user-mode threads (which FreeBSD has, including a specialized version of libc which is thread safe). Some systems, like the Modula3 compiler, even provide their own internal threading mechanism and it works just great - the popular CVSup package for FreeBSD runs multithreaded that way. Netscape is another internally multithreaded application. And if you absolutely Must Have kernel threads for something then those are available as an add-on for FreeBSD as well - search the mail and news archives for the URL to it. At some point, if we can find a serious need, we may bring such kernel thread support into FreeBSD by default, but for now the usermode stuff seems to work just fine. And finally, having a monolithic vs microkernel architecture has NOTHING to do with mulithreading! You can implement kernel threads in either architectural model and saying that you need a microkernel design to have multithreading is like saying that only left handed people vote republican - it's a wholly bogus correlation and you, sir, clearly do not understand what you are talking about. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.