On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 18:39 -0700, James McKenzie wrote: > That is so for Linux but what about the 'other' Unixes? I will look at > what happens under MacOSX to see if threads are supported. > That depends very much on what kernel the Unix flavour uses. Anything based on the Mach micro-kernel (which is tiny and does nothing but pass messages between the other kernel code modules) will be very different from the rest in both thread implementation and performance bottlenecks. The Linux kernel is heading that way with its increased use of user space processes but still is a long way from the Mach's stripped down heart and. as others have said, thread implementation changed completely with the 2.x kernel. IOW, the various *nixen can be very different internally provided that they present the same set of APIs, shells and filing system to applications and the user: IOW if you only ever run applications on Windows using the cygwin or uwin toolset and never run native Windows applications you can almost claim to be running a Unix. Martin
