Nelson Minar wrote:
> >All that other discussion about Linux process table slots and
> >implementation details is interesting, but not really relevant to the
> >distinction between light and heavy.
>
> There's one important difference - you can only have as many threads
> in Linux as you can have processes. And there's a suprisingly low
> upper limit on that, something like 256?
oops.
Aren't we supposed to be able to overcome this limitation? It is really
sad to have this limitation hanging as a big dark cloud above us. ;-}
I believe that this limitation is not the case in some other "massively
inferior" OSes like NT. I would also like to augment that NT threads
appear to share the same address space, except for a private stack. For
example, in order to safely access the heap, you need to wrap your code
into HeapLock and HeapUnLock sys calls.
And not to mention that there is no obvious limit (I am sure it is hidden
somewhere, burried so deeply that you'll probably get the blue screen of
death when you reach it) in the number of active threads ( OK, this is
really off-topic)
>
> I'm curious how Java thread priorities are layered on top of
> LinuxThreads.. When a thread of high priority becomes runnable, is a
> SIGSTOP sent to all lower priority threads to make them stop until the
> high priority thread finishes?
>
This is another interesting subject I would also like to know about.
Dimitris
