[Python-Dev] Point of building without threads?

[Victor Stinner]

2013/1/8 Trent Nelson <trent at snakebite.org>:
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 06:15:45AM -0800, Stefan Krah wrote:
>> Trent Nelson <trent at snakebite.org> wrote:
>> >     All our NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD slaves use --without-thread.
>> >     Without it, they all wedge in some way or another.  (That should be
>> >     fixed*/investigated, but, until then, yeah, --without-threads allows
>> >     for a slightly more useful (but still broken) test suite run on
>> >     these platforms.)
>> >
>> >         [*]: I suspect the problem with at least OpenBSD is that their
>> >              userland pthreads implementation just doesn't cut it; there
>> >              is no hope for the really technical tests that poke and
>> >              prod at things like correct signal handling and whatnot.
>>
>> For OpenBSD the situation should be fixed in the latest release:
>>
>>    http://www.openbsd.org/52.html#new
>>
>> I haven't tried it myself though.
>
>     Interesting!  I'll look into upgrading the existing Snakebite
>     OpenBSD slaves (they're both at 5.1).

Oooh yes, many bugs has been fixed by the implementation of threads in
the kernel (rthreads in OpenBSD 5.2)!

Just one recent example. On OpenBSD 4.9, FD_CLOEXEC doesn't work with
fork()+exec() whereas it works with exec(); on OpenBSD 5.2, both cases
work as expected.
http://bugs.python.org/issue16850#msg179294

Victor