libpthread removal project

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

One of my long-term goals is to remove libpthread and move everything
into libc.  The remaining library will just be stub, and maybe contain
some compatibility data symbols (if we have any by then).

My motivation for this is that we continue to have problems with
underlinking and symbol versioning.  For example, users forget to link
against librt and therefore get the compat definition of timer_create at
run time.  Another example is libstdc++, which uses an unversioned
reference to pthread_create, which is bound to the compat definition of
pthread_create.  (This only works because libstdc++ doesn't pass any
thread attributes.)

Some libraries (including libstdc++) use weak symbol references to
detect the presence of libpthread.  If libpthread has not been loaded,
they assume that they do not have to use atomics for updating counters
etc.  After libpthread removal, this optimization no longer works.  This
is why I plan to add the __libc_single_threaded variable as a
replacement, which will continue to work for detecting single-threaded
processes once pthread_create or pthread_key_create are always
available.  (The not-linking-against-libpthread optimization is already
of decreased use today because a lot of single-threaded processes load
the library indirectly, so I think .)

Previous discussion:

  <https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2019-08/msg00295.html>

Thanks,
Florian