The long awaited switch from pthreads to rthreads in OpenBSD!
reddit / BSD

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[deleted] · 2012-02-19 02:32

[deleted]

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swills · 2012-02-19 03:06

For those who are less familiar, can you fill us in on rthreads or
give a pointer?

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AnthonyJBentley · 2012-02-19 03:30

For a long time, OpenBSD’s
[pthreads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX_Threads) implementation
was “uthreads,” a user‐level threading library that is old,
unmaintained, and buggy. User‐level threads are also bad for
performance—several threads are condensed into a single process run by
the kernel.

Rthreads is a kernel‐level threads library (so named because it uses
the [rfork(2)](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=rfork)
system call). Since it is integrated with the kernel, each thread in a
program is equivalent to a kernel process, which is better for
performance.

[Here is a paper by Ted Unangst describing
rthreads.](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsd2005/tedu-
rthreads.pdf)

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AnthonyJBentley · 2012-02-19 03:32

Try not to call the old threading library “pthreads,” because that’s
ambiguous. Call it “uthreads” instead. uthreads and rthreads are both
_implementations_ of
[pthreads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX_Threads).

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hegbork · 2012-02-19 10:50

It's called rthreads because r is the letter after p.

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brynet · 2012-02-19 15:09

nginx was just linked to the build as well.

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colione · 2012-02-19 17:46

This is true for alphabets (and James Bond movies) not containing qs.

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phessler · 2012-03-22 20:38

where was bufcache bumped to 90%?  There are still bugs when you push
it that high.

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[deleted] · 2012-03-22 21:32

[deleted]

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[deleted] · 2012-03-25 21:43

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