What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <10336 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>The supposed advantage of a thread is that it's cheap to create one,
>even compared with setting up copy-on-write for a fast fork().  The
>obvious disadvantage is that the shared data space requires use of
>concurrency controls among the parallel threads (e.g. monitors).

That's what I thought, but I can't see where it would be useful, except
perhaps to make up for certain OS functions that might be lacking
like the ability to cheaply determine that no I/O is pending on any
of several channels so you can continue doing some work without needing
a new thread.  Wouldn't there be a problem with static data in
library routines (or anywhere else)?

Les Mikesell