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  • Simon Marlow's avatar
    [project @ 1999-11-02 15:05:38 by simonmar] · f6692611
    Simon Marlow authored
    This commit adds in the current state of our SMP support.  Notably,
    this allows the new way 's' to be built, providing support for running
    multiple Haskell threads simultaneously on top of any pthreads
    implementation, the idea being to take advantage of commodity SMP
    boxes.
    
    Don't expect to get much of a speedup yet; due to the excessive
    locking required to synchronise access to mutable heap objects, you'll
    see a slowdown in most cases, even on a UP machine.  The best I've
    seen is a 1.6-1.7 speedup on an example that did no locking (two
    optimised nfibs in parallel).
    
    	- new RTS -N flag specifies how many pthreads to start.
    
    	- new driver -smp flag, tells the driver to use way 's'.
    
    	- new compiler -fsmp option (not for user comsumption)
    	  tells the compiler not to generate direct jumps to
    	  thunk entry code.
    
    	- largely rewritten scheduler
    
    	- _ccall_GC is now done by handing back a "token" to the
    	  RTS before executing the ccall; it should now be possible
    	  to execute blocking ccalls in the current thread while
    	  allowing the RTS to continue running Haskell threads as
    	  normal.
    
    	- you can only call thread-safe C libraries from a way 's'
    	  build, of course.
    
    Pthread support is still incomplete, and weird things (including
    deadlocks) are likely to happen.
    f6692611