On 20 January 2005 10:01, Keean Schupke wrote:
> Simon Marlow wrote:
>
>> We're getting a bit confused here. Keean: the original question was
>> about whether a disk read will stop all other *Haskell* threads.
>> Not OS threads. The two are quite different beasts in GHC.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Simon
>>
>>
> But if GHC is running with the -threaded flag, then other
> Haskell-threads can keep running using the second OS-thread, even
> though one Haskell-thread (and its associated OS thread) is blocking
> - right?
If the call to read() was "safe" (i.e. the FFI "safe" attribute), then
yes. But GHC currently does and "unsafe" call to read(), even with
-threaded, which doesn't give other threads a chance to run.
Perhaps it should be a safe call. That's going to hurt performance
unless you really need to parallelise disk I/O, though. Maybe it
wouldn't hurt too much, someone should measure it.
> In other words even with disk IO (as I said the kernel would not
> busy-wait - so there are
> only two options, this OS-thread is put to sleep, or the data is
> already in a buffer and is
> returned immediately), all the other Haskell-threads should not block
> (provided it is
> running with -threaded)
>
> Have I got that right?
Yes, except that you forgot that not all foreign calls can run
concurrently with Haskell code. Only the "safe" ones can.
Cheers,
Simon
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