Release criteria for libkse -> libpthread switch?

Robert Watson rwatson at freebsd.org
Wed Jan 7 09:05:39 PST 2004


On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Craig Rodrigues wrote:

> I asked this question to re@, but didn't get a clear answer. 
> 
> What is are the release criteria for switching libkse to libpthread?  I
> assume that this is going to be targeted for 5.3, and not 5.2. 
> 
> Dan Eischen has been periodically testing with ACE, which works quite
> well with libkse.  Are there other representative multithreaded
> applications which need to be tested?  If so, which ones? 
> 
> re@ has mentioned that there are problems with ports and PTHREAD_CFLAGS
> and PTHREAD_LIBS which currently prevent switching libkse to libpthread. 
> How many ports need to be fixed?  Does every single port need to be
> fixed before the switch is made?  If not, how many ports can be fixed to
> have an acceptable state of affairs for the switch?
> 
> I am very eager to have a more robust pthreads implementation for
> FreeBSD, so that I can use FreeBSD as a drop-in replacement for Linux
> for several projects that I work on. 
> 
> I think we are pretty close... 

I'm not sure there's a specific documented set of criteria at this point,
other than that the issue probably got addressed too late in the 5.2
release process.  There are a number of running concerns, including: 

(1) Avoid building a binary library name dependency into all the pre-built
    packages we distribute.  Also, resolve any lasting concerns about how
    build processes should say "And I want threads, dammit". 

(2) Have services like process debugging, profiling available and known
    fully functional (or close). 

I agree that we're very close.  I was under the vague impression that we
planned to throw the switch once 5.2 was officially out the door.  Many of
us are running KSE as our libc_r via libmap.conf on all our machines, and
have been for many months, and it appears to hold up quite well :-).
Resolving how best to declare threading support in binaries will also
facilitate shipping the JDK linked against KSE.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research




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