Support for multiple threading models
Robert Lunnon
bobl at optushome.com.au
Sat May 7 03:37:59 CDT 2005
Some time ago, I wrote code to support native threads instead of lwp for SYSV
operating systems, the way I wrote the code all available threading models
were compiled into wine and the actual one to be used was selected by setting
an environment variable. (Currently WINE_THREADMODE). On OSes that support
multiple threading methods, IE Solaris and probably the BSDs this allows for
easy development and testing of thread support. It also allows the simulation
of no thread support (Not that that seems to be very useful).
Originally when I wrote this Solaris 9 was having some problems with crashing
in mutexes if native threads were used, but LWPs weren't perfect either, in
particular lwps aren't necessarily safe to use with some libraries (There is
a warning about this in the Man pages for the _lwp calls, For example. this
caused problems with alarm/usleep calls used at the time in winmm). These
days however in Solaris 10 the native thread code works quite well.
Anyway the fallout was that non winmm code worked best using native threads on
certain Solaris MUs and winmm dependent programs worked best using LWPs and
having the Threading model selectable made sense. This is still the case for
Solaris 8/9 users.
I can still see situations where it would be advantageous to be able to select
the threading model at runtime and I'd like to leave this support in (Solaris
9 for example). This possibility has received a luke warm reception before
but I thought I'd re-raise the possibility now while I'm doing the putback
from my latest patch kit.
Just as a final point Solaris no longer supports _lwp_create calls, without
this patch wine is unable to run on Solaris versions > Solaris 9
Bob
Threading patch attached
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