LinuxThreads is the threading library that was provided with glibc from 2.0 through 2.2/2.3. It was not posix compliant in a number of key ways, and also had some serious scalability issues.
NPTL is the replacement library written for 2.3, and the only threading library officially supported from glibc-2.4 onward. All the distributions are now in a phase where LinuxThreads is being phased out in favour of NPTL. For Dapper, only i386, sparc64, and hppa still had LT. amd64 on Ubuntu has never had them, and it was removed for dapper from sparc32, ia64, and powerpc. In Edgy, LT has been removed completely from glibc, and none of the arches have it available. So in this specific case, amd64 has never had LinuxThreads on Ubuntu. While there are always the possibility of bugs in glibc, my experience is that usually problems that occur like this are bugs in the application where they're assuming some behaviour of LinuxThreads rather than relying on POSIX semantics. The design of NPTL is radically different: All the internal opaque structures are different, it uses Thread Local Storage, etc. The only guarantees for compatability are those that POSIX offers. It's also worth noting that LinuxThreads wasn't fully POSIX compliant. There are some corner cases in the realm of signal delivery which LT couldn't do. NPTL does those correctly now, however, and in those cases we consider the application rather than NPTL to be buggy. I hope that helps! =) Tks, Jeff Bailey -- library ABI-tags not the same for 64bit and 32bit AMD https://launchpad.net/bugs/60711 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
