LinuxThreads future

LinuxThreads future

[Ulrich Drepper]

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Now that NPTL has proven to be portable and working on all kinds of
platforms we'll soon start moving it over to glibc.

This of course opens the question what happens to LinuxThreads.  The
answer is: it's immediately frozen.  No modifications which change the
interface will ever be added.  No new interfaces will ever be added.
This is important to allow recognizing binaries which use NPTL-only
features to be recognized at startup time via symbol versioning.
LinuxThread's libpthread.so will have GLIBC_2.3.2 as the last symbol.

All bugs in the current code are declared features.  People have been
living with them for years now, so it is nothing existential.  I
personally won't spend any time on LinuxThreads anymore.  We are not
going to deliberately break LT compatibility and using the add-on in
glibc will be possible until glibc 2.4 comes out (whenever this will
happen).  There will be no support whatsoever for LinuxThreads once this
happened.

Of course people are free to pick up the LinuxThread sources and do
whatever they want with it (according to the license).  The only request
is that no version name ever used is GLIBC_x.y.z etc.

- -- 
- --------------.                        ,-.            444 Castro Street
Ulrich Drepper \    ,-----------------'   \ Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
Red Hat         `--' drepper at redhat.com `---------------------------
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Re: LinuxThreads future

[Mark Brown]

[Ulrich discusses putting LinuxThreads "out to pasture"]

Once NPTL is public, this is a Good Thing.

> All bugs in the current code are declared features.

Can we modify this - to at least consider support if a serious (such as a
heretofore-unnoticed security defect) problem is found? While NPTL is
the future, many users and developers have invested a lot of time and
money making things that work with Linuxthreads, and will be depending 
on it for a while to come.

Once all the benefits of NPTL are seen, people will move -- but we should 
be
honest and plan for the movement being slow, and not a light-switch.

-------------------
Mark S. Brown 
bmark@us.ibm.com

Re: LinuxThreads future

[Ulrich Drepper]

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Mark Brown wrote:
> While NPTL is
> the future, many users and developers have invested a lot of time

...and found no severe problem.


> and
> money making things that work with Linuxthreads, and will be depending 
> on it for a while to come.

Nobody takes away existing binaries and the current sources.


There is hardly the possibility for security problems.  No unchecked
arrays exist, no string operations happen etc.  In the entire almost 8
years there hasn't been any such instance.


> but we should  be
> honest and plan for the movement being slow, and not a light-switch.

I am honest which is why I say that I'll not work on that code again.
If it makes you happy I say that severe security problems willbe fixed
but only because I cannot imagine there being any such thing.  I don't
want to weaken the wording more since then people will try to argue what
qualifies as severe.  The current code is it, it's the best LT will be.
 People areliving with it now.  Code which exists today lives with it.
If new code shows problems the way out is to not use LT.

- -- 
- --------------.                        ,-.            444 Castro Street
Ulrich Drepper \    ,-----------------'   \ Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
Red Hat         `--' drepper at redhat.com `---------------------------
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