Posix threads in RHAT9

[Michael ODonnell]

> From what I gathered after following several discussions about
> this since Red Hat released their nptl-enabled 2.4 kernel, the
> general answer is 'yes'.  The glibc developers took great pains
> to ensure that if you are not running an nptl kernel, then older
> Linux thread model is used.

> As far as the politics go, I didn't know that there was any lurching
> back and forth at all.  Red Hat did take some heat, but it was
> a little bizarre, if you ask me.  This was something that was
> clearly going to be integrated into the 2.6 kernel and, in fact,
> has been.  Not a Red Hat-only effort, by any means.  Basically,
> people were upset that they had to fix their apps to work with
> the new ntpl threading model.  Most apps worked fine, but there
> were a few (wine and bind, for example) that had to be fixed.
> But AFAIK, most were fixed pretty quickly.

I don't yet feel like I know know where things stand, but FYI
I've heard (since my OP) that there was (is?)  apparently enough
trouble caused by the NPTL (eg, to the threading infrastructure
of various Java packages) that it was arranged that you can
force NPTL disabled either by booting your RHAT kernel with the
"nosysinfo" commandline option, or else run your apps after
saying "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=<kernel-version>" where 2.4.1
means "Linuxthreads with floating stacks" and 2.2.5 means
"Linuxthreads without floating stacks".