Netscape integration (or whither Southsoft ?)

[Darin McBride]

On Fri, 09 Jul 1999 09:14:47 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:

>On Fri, 09 Jul 1999 08:39:44 -0400 (EDT), Darin McBride wrote:
>
>>>>the protected kernel (which, curiously, appears to be copied from OS/2 - so >what does that tell you about Microsoft's ability to engineer a product).  
>
>>>   Funny, I thought the kernel was protected from the days of Unix.  What
>>>does that say about IBM?
>
>>I really doubt it.  At the time, Unix couldn't thread.  There is a
>>serious redesign between the unix kernals and the OS/2 (and NT) kernal.
>
>    Sure it could, was called fork().  Unix had processes, others had
>threads.  Even now when a program can be multithreaded the threads just show
>up as processes.  One process cannot take down the whole box, that would be
>considered a protected kernel in my book.

The process model and the thread model are significantly different
enough to be considered a thorough redesign.  The extra level of
protections (threads aren't protected from each other, carrying
significantly less overhead to create) between like "processes" is
significant.  The various flavours of unix are now getting threads, and
most are having to go through multiple iterations to get it right
because of the significance of the difference.  OS/2, not having that
process-model history, could be engineered, from basically scratch, to
be threaded.

This, I feel, is evidence that the difference between OS/2 and the
unixes is significant enough to be labelled "IBM engineering a
product."

On Fri, 09 Jul 1999 13:52:35 -0400, Jonathan B. Bayer wrote:

>Sorry Steve, you are wrong.  Threads and forked processes are two
>entirely different thins.  A fork creates an entirely new process,
>totally independent from the parent.  It has it's own address space,
>own open files, etc.  Everything is new.  On the other hand, a thread

Woops.  Child processes can inherit open files.  ;-)

>is part of the parent process.  It shares address space, files, window
>handles, etc.  The fact that a thread shows up as a process means that
>it is a lightweight process, but it still shares the program
>environment with the parent.