NGPT Announcement

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
[email protected].
We will be happy to answer any questions or discuss these changes in more
detail.