First, I'm not paying much attention. Maybe next week. However, as
messages that Eudora tags with multiple chiles tend to get my
attention, be aware that the following are non-negotiable:

1) We are relying on OS services for all threading constructs

We are not going to count on 'atomic' operations, low-level assembly
processor guarantees, and we are definitely *not* rolling our own
threading constructs of any sort. They break far too often in the
face of SMP, new processors having different ordering of writes, and
odd hardware issues.

Yes, I know there's a "But..." for each of these. Please don't, I'll
just have to get cranky. We shall use the system thread primitives
and functions.

2) The only thread constructs we are going to count on are:
   *) Abstract, non-recursive, simple locks
   *) Rendezvous points (Things threads go to sleep on until another
thread pings the condition)
   *) Semaphores (in the "I do a V and P operation, with a count")

We are *not* counting on being able to kill or freeze a thread from
any other thread. Nor are we counting on recursive locks, read/write
locks, nor any other things. Unfortunately.

3) I'm still not paying much attention.
--
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
d...@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk