Threading work-around for RH 9

I was reading through some information on NPTL at 
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6753699732.html

I discovered some information. For some systems, such as RH 9, NPTL was 
back-ported, but if you use

# export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

the system will use the LinuxThreads (pthread) environment instead of NPTL. 
This seems to provide a work around until the real problems with NPTL are 
fixed.

The article also discusses migrating to NPTL, which might be useful for 
implementing a true fix.