Announcing the third version of his syslets subsystem patches [story], Ingo Molnar [interview] noted that he has implemented many fundamental changes to the code including the introduction of threadlets, "'threadlets' are basically the user-space equivalent of syslets: small functions of execution that the kernel attempts to execute without scheduling. If the threadlet blocks, the kernel creates a real thread from it, and execution continues in that thread. The 'head' context (the context that never blocks) returns to the original function that called the threadlet." As threadlets are only moved into a separate thread context if they block, Ingo refers to them as 'optional threads'. He also describes them as 'on-demand parallelism', "user-space does not have to worry about setting up, sizing and feeding a thread pool - the kernel will execute the workload in a single-threaded manner as long as it makes sense, but once the context blocks, a parallel context is created. So parallelism inside applications is utilized in a natural way."

Ingo goes on to note that the syslet code and API has been significantly enhanced in this latest release, "the v3 code is ABI-incompatible with v2, due to these fundamental changes." He adds, "syslets (small, kernel-side, scripted 'syscall plugins') are still supported - they are (much...) harder to program than threadlets but they allow the highest performance. Core infrastructure libraries like glibc/libaio are expected to use syslets. Jens Axboe's FIO tool already includes support for v2 syslets, and the following patch updates FIO to the v3 API".