Not much new news from JavaOne for Linux (or for anything, really). I
did stop by Sun's booth for J2SE on Linux and talked a bit with Hong
Zhang, their Hotspot guy for Linux.
Newer Sun releases will be native threads only, not green threads. I
asked why, and got two answers:
Hotspot assumes native threads, so a green threads version would be hard.
Thread management is the OS' job, not the application's.
We talked a bit about the second point. I agree in principle, but
Linux' native threads are just not up to the task. They're slow,
heavy, and limited. Hong agreed they weren't great, but expressed
optimism that things would improve. He said that he's been talking
with the Linux thread implementors some, but hadn't been actively
contributing fixes.
Folks who care about multithread performance on Linux might want to
start working on improving thread support in the kernel. In the past,
my impression is that the major Linux kernel developers don't think
the thread support has problems. I haven't kept up with it enough to
really know - anyone else know more?
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