Replacing Semaphores with Mesa Monitors

Andrew P. Black black at cse.ogi.edu
Thu May 13 07:29:42 UTC 2004


At 20:54 -0500 2004.5.12, Colin Putney wrote:
>I'd think the way to go would be to introduce new primitives for use 
>by monitors and have them co-exist with semphores until the 
>migration is complete and we can do away with semphores. It might 
>also be useful to have this be a change that happens in Squeak 4.0, 
>since VM/image compatibility will be broken anyway.

Yes, that is of course right.  It would be impractical to go "cold 
turkey".   I don't know enough about the way that signals or 
interrupts are translated into Squeak to comment on whether it would 
be a problem for the VM to support both mechanisms for a while.  I 
was hoping that the representations could be close enough that the VM 
wouldn't have to care which it was signalling - which is when I came 
up against the problem that care or not, it decided to insert an 
explicit test.

	Andrew





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