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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a way of thinking - I was an OS hack - Unix device drivers/etc early in my career, I could think about interrupt races/etc but it was hard, I took a detour into designing chips for a decade where EVERYTHING is parallel, by the time I got back to kernel work (Linux was around by then) I found that stuff that had been hard was now obvious.

In short if it's not a good fit for your brain, change your brain!

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H/W components don't share state, which is why H/W parallelism easier. Where they do interact with each other, we have to either design fully async logic or worry about metastability. In contrast all kernels are basically all about sharing state. Even in user code and even when, a language such as Go provides channels, a lot of people seem to use shared state (and mutexes and locks).

I am curious as to how your h/w experience makes it easier hacking on the linux kernel....

There's lots of shared state, every flop is shared state, and mostly here I'm talking about synchronous parallelism in pipelines - yes we do have to deal with metastability too, and that's a whole other level of evil so that people avoid it where possible and spent lots of brainpower mitigating it (metastability is so evil you can't completely make it go away, just make it extremely unlikely).

Go is sort of like saying "we're not going to deal with parallelism directly, just throw everything into fifos to talk to other places" mostly you can't afford to waste gates like that in real hardware (there are places where it makes sense - I've built a lot of display controllers).

I think the big difference is the way you end up thinking about time and timing holes in code (dealing with interrupts), after building gates for a while i think you tend to see the timing holes more easily

Take decade to learn threads? Then expect other devs to do the same? I think that proves the point that threads aren't a good fit, even if we are technically capable of it.

No, it didn't take a decade, that was just how long I did it for (before it got boring) - I just mean that you have to learn to think about parallelism in a different way, we train hardware engineers to do this but not software ones

So it eventually got boring for you. So... threads are a bad mental model for our brains? :P

Not sure what you mean by your statement that hardware engineers are trained to think differently about it. I am not sure there's much overlap between HW and SW engineers in terms of parallelism modelling. Do you have a few examples?

No, chip making got boring - essentially it's a month a year of doing fun creative stuff and 11 months a year making sure that it makes timing and is perfect before you tape out. When you're coding on the other hand you can get something new working every day. I chose to go back to software.

However having said that I find myself designing silicon again, change is good for the brain I guess

Hardware people tend to think in terms of netlists and pipelining so they have to worry about parallism on every clock

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