[cgl_discussion] NGPT announcement

[Stephen Hemminger]

Received this on NGPT list
------------------------------------------

On behalf of the NGPT team, we would like to announce a change in
direction
for the
Next Generation POSIX Threading (NGPT) project.

As many of you may know by now, a new POSIX threading library NPTL
(http://people.redhat.com/drepper/nptl-design.pdf) is now available for
Linux and we don't want to split the community to choose one over the
other. The Linux 2.5 kernel has added many new features in the areas of
Scheduler, POSIX signal handling, clone() improvements and futexes that
make highly scalable and performing threads a more viable solution in
Linux.

With this in mind, we have decided to stop adding new functionality to
the NGPT pThread library and will go in pure support mode. We will
provide full support for the existing NGPT releases and to those who
have incorporated NGPT in their current releases, and work to
bring solutions for other threading requirements to the NPTL community
for discussion and dispositioning. Currently, using Glibc-2.2.x, NGPT
can be used as Linuxthreads replacement library. However, NGPT will not
be supported under Glibc-2.3.

Our original goal was to make threading in Linux more scalable and POSIX
compliant, and it seems clear that NPTL has addressed such issues quite
well. We will continue focus and working in the direction of improving
overall threading performance in Linux.

In summary, we feel that this decision is the best way to support the
community for the long term. We would also like to participate to
improve threads scalability and POSIX compliance for threading package
in Linux. If anyone has any questions or concerns about this decision,
please email us or the NGPT mailing list at
pthreads-devel at www-124.ibm.com.
We will be happy to answer any questions or discuss these changes in
more detail.


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