[ Thanks to Jeremy Andrews for this
link. ]
“Ulrich Drepper recently announced the first public release of
the Red Hat sponsored ‘Native POSIX Thread Library’ (NPTL). He
explained, ‘Unless major flaws in the design are found this code is
intended to become the standard POSIX thread library on Linux
system and it will be included in the GNU C library
distribution.’“One test mentioned in Ulrich’s email–running 100,000
concurrent threads on an IA-32–generated some interesting
discussion. Ingo Molnar explained that with the current stock 2.5
kernel such a test requires roughly 1GB RAM, and the act of
starting and stopping all 100,000 threads in parallel takes only 2
seconds. In comparison, with the 2.5.31 kernel (prior to Ingo’s
recent threading work), such a test would have taken around 15
minutes…”