Interesting analysis of linux kernel threading by IBM

[Davide Libenzi]

Hi Ian,

Friday, January 21, 2000 3:47 PM
Ian Soboroff <ian en cs.umbc.edu> wrote :
> in the vast majority of cases, i suspect it's easier and probably
> better to redesign the app than redesign the scheduler.  that said,
> the improvements already done are quite good and needed.

why You all speak about worse designed multithreaded apps.
Every technology bad applied is worse !
Suppose You have a rendering job to be done.
It can be subdivided in a highly parallel system with distinct threads that
can run together :

1) Viewing transformation
2) Triangulation
3) Scan conversion
4) Texturing
5) Illumination
6) Frame output

just to keep it simple.
Now can someone tell me why I would not split my job into threads ?
You can state that I don't have benfits in uniprocessor systems.
But I have in SMP, that is, IMHO, the future of computing technology.
You can find the needs of parallelism starting from CPUs executions units up
to
complex software systems up to daily work organization.
And if the OS is the bottleneck of parallelism we must try to improve it,
not to avoid multithreading.
Even if modern CPU architectures like IA64 which leave to high tuned
compilers
the work of parallelize ( I don' know if this word is correct ;) ) the code,
I think that
the software designer can do even better, or at least improve, the compiler
job.

Cheers,
    Davide.

--
All this stuff is IMVHO



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