53 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
53 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
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Mesa Threads README
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-------------------
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Thread safety was introduced in Mesa 2.6 by John Stone and
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Christoph Poliwoda.
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It was redesigned in Mesa 3.3 so that thread safety is
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supported by default (on systems which support threads,
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that is). There is no measurable penalty on single
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threaded applications.
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NOTE that the only _driver_ which is thread safe at this time
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is the OS/Mesa driver!
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At present the mthreads code supports three thread APIS:
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1) POSIX threads (aka pthreads).
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2) Solaris / Unix International threads.
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3) Win32 threads (Win 95/NT).
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Support for other thread libraries can be added src/glthread.[ch]
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In order to guarantee proper operation, it is
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necessary for both Mesa and application code to use the same threads API.
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So, if your application uses Sun's thread API, then you should build Mesa
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using one of the targets for Sun threads.
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The mtdemos directory contains some example programs which use
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multiple threads to render to osmesa rendering context(s).
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Linux users should be aware that there exist many different POSIX
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threads packages. The best solution is the linuxthreads package
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(http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/) as this package is the
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only one that really supports multiprocessor machines (AFAIK). See
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http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/README for further
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information about the usage of linuxthreads.
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If you are interested in helping with thread safety work in Mesa
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join the Mesa developers mailing list and post your proposal.
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Regards,
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John Stone -- j.stone@acm.org johns@cs.umr.edu
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Christoph Poliwoda -- poliwoda@volumegraphics.com
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Version info:
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Mesa 2.6 - initial thread support.
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Mesa 3.3 - thread support mostly rewritten (Brian Paul)
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