Architecture/Proposal/Advanced Threading-Architecture

state: sketch

Concept: A purely event driven threading architecture, including asynchronous process related signals, I/O and window messages.

Pros

• Not calling blocking system calls leads to 'short' lasting mutex acquisitions.
• No hand crafted reschedules necessary anymore.
• Easy utilization of Hyper Threading, multi cores and SMP.
• Controlable CPU utilization and possible avoidance of over utilization.
• 'Simple' architecture.
• One single location where to create threads.

Cons

• (assumed to be) Hard to implement.

Pseudo Code for event loop:

void dispatch(int signal) {
  switch(signal) {
  case SIGIO:
    fileHandler(getHandle());
    break;
  case SIGTERM:
  ...
  }
}

int quit;
sigset_t sigset;

int main(void) {
  int signal;

  while(!quit) {
    sigwait(&sigset, &signal);
    dispatch(signal);
  }

  return 0;
}

Graphical overview: