Fast thread-local storage for OpenGL drivers

[Dan Kegel]

David Laight wrote:
>>I suspect most of the old versions of Linux you're worried
>>about will vanish from user's desktops fairly quickly
>>as soon as Linux distributions ship versions that
>>include the current suite of improvements.  (Not that
>>people will kill for the new glibc, but there are
>>a whole lot of improvements in font handling and
>>desktop apps coming out shortly.)
> 
> 
> Remember that wine runs on other OS (eg NetBSD) which isn't going
> to start using glibc ever....

I'm glad you brought up BSD; IMHO one of the arguments
*for* using gcc's __thread support is that the underlying
ABI appears to be very carefully defined for a largeish number
of processors.  This was a lot of work.  Other operating
systems that want to add TLS support can use the Linux TLS ABI
as a guide, save themselves the effort, and perhaps end
up more binary-compatible with Linux as a side-effect.

(Say, Gareth, have you discussed this with Jon Leech?
See http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/
Seems like you want to revise or add to that ABI,
so you ought to involve the ABI's authors in the discussion.
Jon, have a look at this thread at
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phil-list/2003-February/thread.html)

- Dan

-- 
Dan Kegel
http://www.kegel.com
http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=78045