Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!caen!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!ogicse!pdxgate!eecs!berggren From: berggren@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Eric Berggren) Newsgroups: comp.os.mach Subject: Re: Threads, Definition of Message-ID: <1476@pdxgate.UUCP> Date: 7 Feb 91 20:17:00 GMT References: <4964@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> Sender: news@pdxgate.UUCP Lines: 31 dmason@msg.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Mason) writes: >In article <4964@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> cs4213@umbc5.umbc.edu (cs4213) writes: >> Can anyoneoffer a succinct definition of threads aka lightweight >> processes??? Citations will be met with gratitude, terse, lucid explanations >> with fawning adoration. >As I'm supposed to be working on a paper about this at this very >moment, rather than reading news (-: >Lightweight processes are processes that share an address space. >The implications, ramifications and implementations of this vary >wildly. Implementations of lwp's on Unix systems vary from Sun lwp's >and the uSystem where several lwp's share a Unix process and the >operating system knows nothing of their existence, through Mach >threads which are almost as lightweight as they can get with the >operating system knowing about them, up to systems where lwp's are >effectively full Unix processes which have mapped a common area of >memory to work with. How, exactly, does this differ from shared memory processes? Thanx. -e.b. ============================================================================== Eric Berggren | "Round and round the while() loop goes; Computer Science/Eng. | Whether it stops," Turing says, berggren@eecs.cs.pdx.edu | "nobody knows."