From: Shivkumar Chandrasekaran <shiv@ece.ucsb.edu>

> not. But I seem to have the same problem as discussed by Markus Mottl 
> (see attachment below) on Mac OS X 10.2.4 on a dual processor G4 
> machine. An earlier message in that thread mentioned that there was no 
> such problem on dual-processor Linux machines.

Let's answer again, since this is a frequent question: ocaml threads
do not not support parrallelism. Only one ocaml thread will run at a
time, independently of the number of processors, and this on any
architecture/OS.

> > From :Markus Mottl < mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at >
> > The only thing I can imagine is that OCaml somehow changes
> > scheduling so that the threads cannot run in parallel anymore, even if
> > "enter_blocking_section" is used. Is this possible? Or am I just making
> > some stupid mistake?

enter_blocking_section only happens in C code, and is followed by a
leave_blocking_section before returning to caml code. Since the
leave_blocking_section reacquires the lock, no more than one ocaml
thread can run simultaneously.
Easy way to crash the runtime: call a caml callback immediately after
an enter_blocking_section.  The two caml threads will start to
allocate simultaneously on the same heap, without any locking...

Jacques Garrigue
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