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Diffstat (limited to 'community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads.mdwn')
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads.mdwn | 49 |
1 files changed, 49 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2270c774 --- /dev/null +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, +Inc."]] + +[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable +id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this +document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or +any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant +Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license +is included in the section entitled +[[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]] + +[[!meta title="Convert Hurd Libraries and Servers to pthreads"]] + +[[!tag open_issue_libpthread]] + +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. + +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 +[[pthreads implementation for the Hurd|libpthread]] +was created in the meantime, it's not +possible to use both cthreads and pthreads in the same program. Consequently, +pthreads can't presently be used in any Hurd servers -- including translators. + +(Thus it's impossible to use the [Hurd +libfuse](http://www.nongnu.org/hurdextras/#libfuse) with any FUSE modules +depending on pthreads for example.) + +Most of the conversion has already been done in previous efforts (see +[[!GNU_Savannah_task 5487]]) -- but the tricky parts are still missing. + +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 +transition, they will have to be fixed as well. + +This project requires relatively little Hurd-specific knowledge. Experience +with multithreaded programming in general and pthreads in particular is +required, though. + +Possible mentors: Barry deFreese (bddebian), Samuel Thibault (youpi) + +Exercise: Try to fix one of the outstanding issues with the work done so far. +It's not yet complete, and there hasn't been much debugging yet, so it should +not be too hard to find something needing improvement -- but if you don't see +anything obvious, feel free to talk to us about an alternative exercise task. |