From: "Hal E. Fulton" Date: 2001-04-25T10:36:13+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:14184] Re: threads and IO.popen questions ----- Original Message ----- From: Lyle Johnson To: ruby-talk ML ; Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 2:11 PM Subject: [ruby-talk:14107] Re: threads and IO.popen questions > > - It seems that all threads are running on a single CPU on a SMP > > systems (SUN Sparc)... > > Is it true? If yes, is there a trick to make threads running on all > CPUs? > > Yes and no, respectively ;) > > Ruby's threading implementation uses in-process threads (sometimes known as > "microthreads", I think) as opposed to "native" threads. There have been > recent discussions about the issues involved with a native threads > implementation for Ruby; check the list or newsgroup archives if you're > interested. > Which brings up a purely theoretical question. Wouldn't it be possible to write a system-dependent extension that used native (kernel-level) threads? Do POSIX threads (pthreads) have a kernel-level option? If so, then they'd be fairly portable... Somebody told me a week or two ago that there was such a thing as kernel-level pthreads, which surprised me as I'd never heard that before... Hal