Next Generation POSIX Threads

Next Generation POSIX Threads

Posted Sep 21, 2002 10:33 UTC (Sat) by Peter (guest, #1127)
In reply to: Next Generation POSIX Threads by Nero
Parent article: Native POSIX Thread Library 0.1 released

"The glibc people never intended for NGPT to replace the old pthread library."

[though, I can't think why not..]

My theory: NIH. glibc, being a GNU project, requires copyright assignments; perhaps the NGPT people were less than forthcoming at giving them.

Alternate theory: as Uli notes in his announcement, they concluded that the complexity of MxN threading does not pay off in performance for realistic workloads, compared to simply optimising the kernel to handle large numbers of truly lightweight threads. MxN was all anyone talked about a few years ago, but more than one person in this thread (no pun intended) on linux-kernel has said 1x1 makes more sense. One such person is Larry McVoy, whom I'll trust on scalability issues any day. (Well, until he disagrees with Dave Miller, like on the numa clusters thing - hard to know which horse to bet on there!)

Speaking of GNU NIH, does anyone know how does the gnutls project plans to differentiate themselves from openssl?

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