On 1/13/06, Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Honestly, I dunno what nptl is. I generally leave USE stuff alone unless I > KNOW it is something I don't need or someone tells me I don't need it. I > went through this recently with the gnome USE flag.
nptl is "native posix threading library"! What it means is that since the 2.6 kernel now supports threads natively, that glibc can call the APIs in the kernel for thread creation and synchronization, instead of simulating it with another library (libpthread). So if you have +nptl, programs have the option of using native threads instead of pthreads. This is usually a good thing, as native thread synchronization mechanisms are significantly faster than pthreads. Using +nptlonly causes libpthreads to not be built at all (actually it is, but just a set of stubs around the native methods). This forces all applications to use native threads. There are some behavior differences between nptl and posix threads that caused some problems with applications early on. However, I personally have been using nptlonly for a while (I don't remember exactly when I turned it on), without any trouble. In fact, AFAIK, nobody has reported any trouble with nptlonly recently. bugs.gentoo.org only returns 2 open bugs relating to nptl, one while building an older version of mozilla-firefox that nobody has been able to reproduce, and another indicating that +nptl +nptlonly or -nptl -nptlonly are the only sane options currently. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
