POSIX / pthreads / wineserver - can I help?

[Alexandre Julliard]

"Stefan Jones" <cretin at gentoo.org> writes:

> I have been following for a few months now the recent glibc and nptl
> changes. How glibc now eliminated it's own version of wineserver in it's
> thread implementation with nptl.

That's not really the right comparison, the wineserver is not an
equivalent of the linuxthreads manager; it's more an equivalent of the
Windows kernel.

> My idea is to alter wine so that it runs on any 100% ish POSIX threading
> system, aka glibc, and thus offload many tasks to the system library and
> solve the difficulties for good.

You can't really do that; generic pthreads simply doesn't offer the
functionality we need. It's possible to use the glibc nptl pthreads,
but that's only because of the way they are implemented on top of
kernel threads; this isn't a general property of pthreads, so a 100%
POSIX threaded Wine is not possible.

Once I get the nptl support working there will probably be a number of
things that can be done to take better advantage of the new threading
support, and any help with that is welcome. But in all cases such code
can only be added as an option, it can't replace the existing code
since we have to run on older kernels as well as on other systems.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com