Re: Newbie questions

[Helmethead <hoshem mel comcen com au>]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 06:37:18PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> >I plan to install the latest 2.4 kernel, Red Hat 7.1 distro.  I'm sure
> >it will include GTK+, glibc, etc.  Will that be GTK+ 1.2 or 2.0, or
> >both?  Is there a reason why I would want one over the other?  Also, I
> >have probably every RH distro from recent years available.  I wanted the
> >2.4 kernel, because I understand its implementation of pthreads is
> >better, but am I choosing unwisely here?
> 
> The 2.4 kernel is better in every way, but has nothing really to do
> with pthreads. pthreads are user-space threads; in the linux
> implementation (or rather, the most common linux implementation), they
> happen to use a rather gorgeous linux system call called clone(2). but
> the kernel's handling of threads has not changed dramatically in quite
> some time now. 
> 

Ooh I think I know this one. The change he's referring to is probably the new "wake one" behaviour, when 20 threads are select()ing on the same file descriptor, only one gets woken up. This feature is basically for web servers and other internet services. I imagine it wouldn't make much difference for his project.