Why do OS not support erlang's lightweight process?

tty@REDACTED tty@REDACTED
Tue Aug 29 05:21:56 CEST 2006


Another possibility is OSE by Enea (http://www.enea.com/templates/Extension____258.aspx).  The Ericsson guys may have more to say about it [1]. I only heard it in passing and never used it.

t

[1] Rumour being it originated from Ericsson. To be taken with large grain of salt. Definately Ericsson is listed as an early adopter (1988). 

-------- Original Message --------
From: ke han <ke.han@REDACTED>
Apparently from: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED
To: lang er <erlangist@REDACTED>
Cc: "Erlang Users' List" <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
Subject: Re: Why do OS not support erlang's lightweight process?
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:29:26 +0800

> James,
> I'm pretty sure Inferno http://www.vitanuova.com/index.html have  
> lightweight OS processes/threads.
> It is probably possible to have a linux kernel written to support  
> processes which take up much fewer resource, are quicker to allocate,  
> context switch...but you would probably break so much stuff used by  
> other traditional *nix apps that you would end up with a special  
> purpose OS which runs nothing well except your apps meant for these  
> lightweight processes.  I'm no kernel expert so I'll stop my  
> speculation here ;-).
> ok, I can't resist...another fantasy option would be to build up new  
> alternate kernel level process/thread objects which have the  
> characteristics you want and "simply" have the OS scheduler be much  
> smarter to handle both heavy and lightweight processes.   But I seem  
> to notice that experiments with developing "complex" schedulers  
> haven't done so well.
> 
> I did study inferno two years ago when I was on my overreaching  
> journey to find "better ways to build software".  This journey led me  
> to study scala and erlang as well.  erlang was the only thing that  
> was mature enough and could coexist well enough with existing *nix apps.
> In another year, with the advent of cheap and easy to manage virtual  
> OSes running on a resource aplenty $5000 server, one probably could  
> much more seriously look at building apps with inferno as the app  
> itself would just sit in inferno running as its own vm running  
> happily alongside other *nix vms.
> 
> I think a erlang OS has been worked on by some gurus on this very  
> list...perhaps they can expand on this topic?
> 
> ke han
> 
> On Aug 29, 2006, at 6:20 AM, lang er wrote:
> 
> > If OS support erlang's lightweight  process in kernel,  many  
> > programming languages could have  erlang's concurrent capability.I  
> > think it is not impossible.
> >
> > BR!
> > James



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