how can i enable "pthreads" in SuSE 8.2?

tia

bump.

For threads to actually work you need SMP (symmetric multi-processing support) enabled in your kernel. Oh, not to forget, multiple processors !

What are you trying to do exactly ?

You're confusing parallelism (things occurring simultaneously) with concurrency (things appearing to occur simultaneously through interleaving of operations).

Threads offer concurrency on a uniprocessor machine, and some combination of parallelism and concurrency on a multiprocessor machine.

You don't need SMP for threads to work.

Lyle

yeah, i don't think it's as complicated as pres might be thinking; i'm trying to run several games and apps using transgamings latest version of winex 3.1, and it give me this "error" everytime i start a game/app

"moo@linux:~> winex3
Your system requires the use of pthreads but the maximum system allowed stack size of 2052 kB may be too small for some games
usage: winex3 [-bigexe] [-use-pthreads <yes/no>] [[-]-winver <version>] [[-]-debugmsg <debug>] [[-]-version] [[-]use-dos-cwd <dir>] <application> [application parameters]"

if i could increase the stack size or enable pthreads, i'm sure this would help the bugginess and crashes i experience while running things under winex.

tia.

I've never tried winex, but I get the feeling that when it says "Your system requires the use of pthreads" it means that winex is running as if you had specifed "-use-pthreads yes".

I don't think there's a way to enable or disable pthreads on your system; it's just there or not there. I'm guessing you have it.

Run "ulimit -s unlimited" before running winex to increase your stack size. Look at "man bash" and search for ulimit for more information.

Lyle

I just realized you probably won't be allowed to increase your stack size.

Maybe somebody else can teach us how to do this.

Lyle

:/ man..... this sux.

Whoops ! Busted it's a fair cop.

Yes, that is true, you don't need SMP for threads to work. At the time of my original posting fr0ggeh was also on the forums, so I was hoping to pump him for some more information in real time. But he didn't reply at the time.

On a single processor the "offer" of concurrency is pretty weak, since concurrency through forking's there. Sure using threads as a lightweight "process" has certain advantages regarding allocations and sharing, but at the end of the day unless you're running a MP machine threading gets a "big whoopee". Just like you can run PVM (parallel virtual machine) software on a standalone machine - big whoopee.

I know threads will "work" on a single processor. The original question was so vague - did he want to know how to link "-lpthreads" because he was getting link errors, or something else ? I had hoped to open a dialogue, but didn't. I'm not confused by parallelism/concurrency - I am however a bit dirty on the usefulness of threading. I had a stint of programming using pthreads and I have decided that one may as well use PVM instead considering the hardware situation (glut of old boxes being thrown away, begging to be clustered for a song).

Yeah, threads may not be all that great. I used to think that they were the way to go, but then I read this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/ta...mchapter.html.

Lyle