Does Linux Support Threads or Lightweight Processes?
As well as the Unix multiprocessing model involving heavyweight processes, which is of course part of the standard Linux kernel, there are several implementations of lightweight processes or threads. Recent kernels implement a thread model, kthreads. In addition, there are the following packages available for Linux. • GNU glibc2 for Linux has optional support for threads. The archive is available from the same place as glibc2, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ • In ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/pthread/ or ftp://ftp.ibp.fr:/pub/unix/threads/pthreads. Documentation isn’t in the package, but is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/proven/home_page.html. Newer Linux libc’s contain the pthreads source. The GNU Ada compiler on ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/devel/lang/ada/ contains binaries made from that source code. • In ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/qt-001.tar.Z is QuickThreads.
