question on threads proposal

Steve Huss-Lederman (lederman@cs.wisc.edu)
Fri, 21 Jun 1996 11:12:10 -0500

I am thinking about Marc's recent threads chapter. Before we had the
ability to lock and unlock handlers. Now p. 4 line 25-6 says one
should use mutual exclusion with thread synchronization. This seems
to imply that users who never use threads but want handlers need to
learn about mutex in their system. Also, this will not be portable.
Going even farther, what about systems that don't support threads but
do support handlers. How is mutual exclusion done (system
dependent?).

I was wondering if we could extend the MUTEX in section 0.1.4 to do
this. If one gives MPI_COMM_SELF as the communicator then the mutex
is on the threads within that process. Does this make sense?

Steve