Threading in the future?

[Aurelien Jarno]

Brian M. Carlson a écrit :
> I was browsing around glibc CVS, and I found that starting with version 2.4 of 
> glibc, LinuxThreads will be completely unsupported.  As a consequence, I 
> asked on libc-ports about possibly porting NPTL to GNU/kFreeBSD.  I got the 
> response that it doesn't seem like NPTL would work very well for GNU/kFreeBSD 
> kernel, due to Linux-specific assumptions.

AFAIK, etch will be released with glibc 2.3.x. Moreover, I have heared 
that linuxthreads will be maintained by Debian glibc maintainers until 
all (linux) ports switch to NPTL.

> Specifically, drow (Daniel Jacobowitz) said:
> 
>>A fully POSIX thread library for your port is a good idea, which
>>LinuxThreads isn't.  However, I am skeptical about how much mileage you'll
>>be able to get from NPTL without duplicating some of its interfaces in
>>FreeBSD.
> 
> 
> So, when glibc drops support for LinuxThreads, what should we do?  Use NPTL?  
> Use libkse/libpthread?  Use libthr?  Write something else?  Do something else 
> I haven't thought of?
> 
> When we have a consensus, I'll be happy to help implement it, but I'd like to 
> know what the plan will be first.
Well, we can start to make some plan, but IMHO it is not the top 
priority. We will have threads support via linuxthreads for 2 years or so.

Then I think we should make as less as possible modifications to the 
FreeBSD kernel. That means that NPTL is not a good choice, except if it 
is supported upstream for the linux compatibility layers. Then, about 
the others threading methods kFreeBSD offers, I don't know which one in 
the best one. We have to look at the changes that are need in the glibc 
to support them, but AFAIK, glibc is not really portable on that point.

Aurelien

-- 
   .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
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