New pthreads library

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl>]

Hi,

Over the last few months I have been working on a pthreads library for
the Hurd.  Unlike the LinuxThreads library, I have tried to seperate
the system-independend bits as much from the system-dependent bits as
possible, in order to make porting to other systems as easy as
possible.  Several people have expressed the opinion that it would be
a good idea that ultimately all glibc ports would use the same
pthreads library.  To make it possible to use my pthreads library on
Linux too, I'm making a snapshot of my work available and ask
everybody who's interested to take a look at it and discuss it on the
list.

The snapshot is available at:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/contrib/kettenis/pthread-19990825.tar.gz

Not all necessary functions have been implemented yet, but it is my
intention to implement at least those things that LinuxThreads has.
The mutex implementation is a generic one that uses spinlocks.  Of
course this will be replaced with an optimzed version for specific
machines like the one in LinuxThreads.

Nothing is fixed yet.  Please feel free to criticise everything.  I'm
prepared to design huge parts of the library from the ground up if
that increases the chances of making this the unified glibc pthreads
library.

Mark