Alan Grimes wrote:
> Chris Muller wrote:
> 
>  >>The major improvment that I'm trying to work towards is SMP/SMT support.
>  >>Squeak today is strictly single threaded...
>  >>   
>  >>
> 
>  >Could this be done in a platform independent way?  I'm no expert with
>  >concurrent thread programming, but my impression is that instances of 
> Process
>  >in Smalltalk are copmletely identical across platforms because they're 
> just
>  >internal objects, not OS threads.  This is nice for portability, so 
> OS-Thread
>  >support would be a different, *additional* thing available for use.  
> Is that right?
>  > 
>  >
> 
> It would be invisable to the user. It may require some relatively minor
> changes to the image, I don't know.
> 
> The actual thread implementation will depend on the threading library
> available on the platform.
> 
> Currently Squeak uses a Many:1 scheduler. It manages "many" processes
> and schedules them onto one interpreter. I propose to implement a
> Many:Many scheduler. There would be N interpreters for the number of
> available computing elements. In addition to these there would be
> "helper" threads that would be dedicated to IO tasks.

I like this. This is (IMO) the correct way to do it.Just curious though, 
and I most likely missed this, just noticed this thread and all, but how 
do you propose sync'ing the garbage collector's activities between your 
"many" interpreters?

-- 
Travis Griggs
Objologist
Key Technology
Achille's Heel?!?! What about "Goliath's Forehead"

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