The intent here is to fully remove the previous Solaris thread
implementation so we don't need to simulate both Solaris kernel
and user space thread APIs. The few user space consumers of the
thread API have been updated to use the kthread API. In order
to support this we needed to more fully support the kthread API
and that means not doing crazy things like casting a thread id
to a pointer and using that as was done before. This first
implementation is not effecient but it does provide all the
corrent semantics. If/when performance becomes and issue we
can and should just natively adopt pthreads which is portable.
Let me finish by saying I'm not proud of any of this and I would
love to see it improved. However, this slow implementation does
at least provide all the correct kthread API semantics whereas
the previous method of casting the thread ID to a pointer was
dodgy at best.
Brian Behlendorf