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GaloisInc / HaLVM

The Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (HaLVM): GHC running on Xen
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
1.05k stars 88 forks source link

SMP Support #5

Closed acw closed 11 years ago

acw commented 12 years ago

It would be nice if HaLVMs could use all the cool parallel stuff from the mainline of GHC, by utilizing multiple Xen VCPUs. I think this is not actually all that difficult. In this case, when we boot up, we would figure out how many VCPUs we had been given and pass the appropriate number through the built-in command line. "Starting a new OS thread" then becomes booting an auxiliary processor. The big issue, really, is rewriting the locking structures that the GHC runtime expects of its threaded runtime. Once the basic support for SMP HaLVMs is in place, we would also have to strongly consider just removing support for non-threaded-runtime versions of the HaLVM.

viloocity commented 11 years ago

I would personally avoid reverting to threads "by all means" but try to find something more innovative, i.e. coordination models.