From: Linus T. <tor...@tr...> - 2003-05-30 06:01:04
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On Thu, 29 May 2003, Ian Romanick wrote: > > You're right. We do _really_ want to use futex'es. However, I don't > think they're available on *BSD or Solaris. No. But you don't want to use them directly anyway, they're at the wrong level. I haven't checked what glibc does, but I bet it has a nice wrapper around them that makes them look basically like user-level spinlocks. And once you have a nice wrapper and they look like spinlocks, *BSD and Solaris must have _some_ equivalent. If worst comes to worst, you do a "loop with atomic accesses and yield()" thing as a fallback. > We also have the problem of having to support old kernels with new > user-mode drivers. You may also have interesting binary compatibility issues with old and new DRI binaries running concurrently. However, I don't think the old kernels are that much of an issue, I think futexes got back-ported a fair time ago, and I'd assume that most people who want to have a really recent DRI setup have a fairly recent distribution too.. But yeah, I don't know which distributions picked up the backports. I don't follow 2.4.x.. Linus |