Although Solaris is now mostly defunct, its influence remains substantial; technologies pioneered by Solaris can still be found across a wide range of software
A lot of Solaris’ inventions have been described and talked about ad nauseam (such as the Slab Allocator), but one I rarely see discussed is its use of turnstiles.
Despite being relatively obscure, the idea has quietly spread far beyond Solaris. Variations of it can now be found in major operating systems, web browsers, and language runtimes. In fact, you’re probably using several implementations of the same basic concept right now!
↫ Loïc Grégoire
I’m not going to pretend to understand all of this, but I know you people do, and many of you will definitely find this interesting to read. Also note that Grégoire develops their own operating system kernel called zag.
Yes, this is interesting
Parallel programming always pays a synchronization cost for any workload over trivially separable ones. And yes, all kinds of fancy things can happen in the wild, where your entire system can become deadlocked, since “thing that should never happen” actually happens
This turnstiles idea is interesting. It is not a perfect solution (as the article admits at the end), but makes the job of the OS developer much easier by simplifying the tree structure into a flat list.