The historical reasons why Jikes RVM uses green threads aren't that relevant to this list, so I'll just direct any one who cares to recent discussion on the Jikes RVM core list. Personally, I think Jikes RVM should be moving to native threading mainly to make it easier to run apps with native code that assumes native threading, but that's not relevant to your question. > Maybe you know something I don't. Is there any wordage in the JNI > spec that forbids blocking calls, or suggests that this might be > problematic? Is there any wordage in the JNI spec that allows the > Jikes RVM to behave in the way that it does with repect to blocking > calls? The JNI spec 8.1.5 basically says that if you are writing native code, and your native code assumes a threading model that is different from the one used by the JVM then you shouldn't expect your application/native code to operate correctly. It discusses green threads explicitly. So, the spec allows this, but notes (correctly) that most complex native code in the world is unlikely to work when run on a JVM that uses green threads. --dave
