diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn | 16 |
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn index 7b45f666..de5df566 100644 --- a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn @@ -377,9 +377,11 @@ applications. ## convert Hurd servers to pthreads -The Hurd was originally created at a time when the pthreads standard didn't -exist yet. Thus all Hurd servers and libraries are using the old cthreads -package that came with Mach, which is not compatible with pthreads. +The Hurd was originally created at a time when the [pthreads +standard](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/pthread.h.html) +didn't exist yet. Thus all Hurd servers and libraries are using the old +[[cthreads|hurd/libcthreads]] package that came with [[microkernel/Mach]], +which is not compatible with [[pthreads|hurd/libpthread]]. Not only does that mean that people hacking on Hurd internals have to deal with a non-standard thread package, which nobody is familiar with. Although a @@ -388,7 +390,9 @@ possible to use both cthreads and pthreads in the same program. Consequently, pthreads can't presently be used in any Hurd servers -- including translators. Some work already has been done once on converting the Hurd servers and -libraries to use pthreads, but that work hasn't been finished. +libraries to use pthreads, but that work hasn't been finished. It is available +as [[GNU_Savannah_task 5487]] and can of course be used to base the new work +upon. The goal of this project is to have all the Hurd code use pthreads. Should any limitations in the existing pthreads implementation turn up that hinder this @@ -397,12 +401,14 @@ transition, they will have to be fixed as well. One possible option is creating a wrapper that implements the cthreads interfaces on top of pthreads, to ease the transition -- but it might very well turn out that it's easier to just change all the existing code to use pthreads -directly. This is up to the student. +directly. This is up to the student. Such a wrapper has been proposed as +[[GNU_Savannah_task 7895]]. This project requires relatively little Hurd-specific knowledge. Experience with multithreaded programming in general and pthreads in particular is required, though. + ## sound support The Hurd presently has no sound support. Fixing this requires two steps: One is |