[Chicken-users] CVS update (1090): scheduler and blocking I/O

[felix]

Hello, everybody!

The current CVS version features an improved scheduler that
is able to block threads selectively on I/O. There is no proper
API yet, but some basic experiments seem to work fine.

It is fairly simple: `##sys#thread-block-for-i/o' adds a given
thread to a list of fd/thread pairs. The scheduler checks
on every thread-switch wether any threads are waiting for I/O
and (if there are) calls `select()', and subsequently unblocks
any threads for which the fd's signal input or output.
The implementation should be tuned somewhat, but generally
it works ok.

How to implement non-blocking I/O:

If srfi-18 is used/required, we have the following procedure:

[procedure] (##sys#thread-block-for-i/o THREAD FD FLAG)
  Blocks THREAD on file-descriptor FD for input (FLAG is true)
  or output (FLAG is false). Note that this doesn't perform a
  context switch (call `thread-yield!' for actually switching
  to another thread).

Now we can create a custom I/O port (say buffered), that reads/writes
from/to a file and, when no data is available, invokes the
mentioned procedure and waits for more.

Any suggestions, comments, bug-reports welcome.


cheers,
felix