[erlang-questions] Driver Threading & Message Sending

[Rickard Green]

You can only use driver_output() from "emulator threads". When the 
runtime system with smp support is used, you can use driver_send_term() 
from any thread.

See http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erl_driver.html for more info.

BR,
Rickard Green, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB.

Benjamin Tolputt wrote:
> More questions though this time (while related to Stand Along Erlang, it 
> also applies to general Erlang driver stuff I am developing).
> 
> The benefit of Erlang which are pushing me to evangelize it to the game 
> development crew is the high concurrency and CPU utilization on 
> multi-core machines (i.e. it's SMP capabilities). To this end, they 
> asked if it would be possible for them to run their physics & AI modules 
> in a separate started up in a Erlang driver. This seems quite possible, 
> but I wanted to know a couple of things about how threading & drivers 
> are allowed to operate.
> 
> Let's say that a driver is created for the AI engine utilizing whatever 
> techniques they desire for this. Let's also assume that they are running 
> this in a permanent loop (the classic "while (true)" thing) with input 
> coming in from Erlang through the driver interface and sending messages 
> back out the same way.
> 
> Is it safe for the driver code to call the "driver_output" function from 
> a thread other than one in which the emulator "calls into" the driver 
> (i.e. is it possible to call driver_output from a thread not started by 
> the emulator)? If not, what is the common method used to get output 
> generated by the driver independent of queries (i.e. a call to the 
> drv_output driver callback) from Erlang? Polling for output from the 
> driver seems a bit strange given the message-centric method of 
> everything else, but I haven't been this low-level with Erlang before...
> 
> Regards,
> B.J.Tolputt
> 
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