uthread-A User Space Threading Library Supporting Multi-Core Systems

• Lightweight user threads with support for blocking IO and fast context switching (ie. similar to Erlang or Go but using C)
• Fast, scalable load balancing across multiple cores
• Lock-free data structures
• Supports x86 and x86_64. Further architectures can be added easily.
• Supports native event backends on Linux and Solaris
• Supports libev event backend

Motivation

• Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) - Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, and Eric Brewer
  • Specifically, the following quote summarizes nicely: "...the duality argument of Lauer and Needham ... implies that good implementations of thread systems and event systems will have similar performance."

Building

• Type 'make' to build the library and run the unit tests
• Link your application to libfiber.so
• Be sure to define the architecture when including libfiber's headers. You can specify the following gcc flags:
  • For x86 64 bit: -m64 -DARCH_x86_64
  • For x86 32 bit: -m32 -march=i686 -DARCH_x86
• libfiber.so overrides many system calls so make sure you know what you're doing
• The makefile will attempt to detect gcc split stack support (Go uses this). This requires gcc 4.7 or higher. I recommend using this.
  • make CC=gcc-4.7