[Sablevm-developer] Threading support in SableVM

[Grzegorz B. P. <ga...@de...>]

Hi Chris, hi everybody,

I've just re-read the reports about JGF benchmarsk and I am really
worried by how it looks. Especially that we didn't know previously that
there were problems. I have problems on SMP machines but that's not
a _regression_. But apparently we have some _regressions_, especially
in threading.

Chris, have you looked at these regressions again? Are they present
in current staging version too? Do you have some traces about what
exactly is happenning? Could you maybe try to debug sablevm behavior?
I think that from active developers you might be the person most
interested in multithreading (and simultanous execution in general),
so this naturally makes you our 'Multithreading Expert'.

This way or another we need to track this issue and fix this. Not being
able to run benchmarks is *bad* thing in research (and this has impact
on practical usefulness too!). Looking at it in the long term - do you
think it would be feasible to create our own test cases/min-apps that
would stretch and excersise SableVM's threads? I *will* be running
regular tests of SableVM soon and I could put them in test set (they
should ideally produce some output that I could compare w/ the expected
one and register success/failure of such test).

But of course the first thing now would be to track this issue and try
to fix it. I guess David could help w/ Classpath/SableVM glue code as he
has lots of experience there and this is most probably the source of
our problems.

I don't imagine we can release stable SableVM 1.2.0 w/ (slightly) broken
threads. We might not support some features, but the existing ones
cannot be broken.

Cheers,

				Grzegorz B. Prokopski