Subj : Re: How to manage time-slicing in Pthreads programs?
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Joe Seigh
Date : Sun Feb 20 2005 08:31 am

On 19 Feb 2005 21:40:20 -0800, D'artagnan <musketeers@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> How? Are these ways involving signals? I kind of remember signals in
> Linux threads are somewhat goofy. Am I wrong?

Unix signals are brain damaged beyond redemption.

>
> Basically, what I'm headed for here is that I want user-level atomic
> operations. Locks in Pthreads synchronize accesses to shared locations,
> but multiple threads can still execute the same operation at the same
> time. An atomic operation is one that once started by a thread it runs
> to its completion without being swapped out and back.
>

Sound like lock-free.  So, you have written or are planning to write your
own lock-free stuff?  If you're trying to avoid condition variables because
they require a mutex you don't need, you can look at the eventcount stuff
in http://atomic-ptr-plus.sourceforge.net/  It's futex (NPTL) based and is
for 32 bit Linux only.  Program logic with eventcounts looks a lot like
program logic with condition variables.  It's basically constraint driven.
You may not notice a real performance advantage over condition variables
since you can't get a lot of contention out of only two threads.


-- 
Joe Seigh

.