From: Available software

Now that POSIX has arrived at a standard threads interface, it is
expected that all major Unix vendors will soon release conformant
threads packages.  Currently, vendor-supplied threads packages vary
widely in the interfaces they provide.  Some vendors' packages conform
to various drafts of the POSIX standard, while others provide their
own interfaces.

OS/2, Windows NT and Windows 95 all provide threads interfaces.  None
conforms to the POSIX standard, and neither IBM nor Microsoft has
signalled any intention to provide conformant threads interfaces.

- Michael T. Peterson <mtp@big.aa.net> has written a POSIX and DCE
  threads package, called PCthreads, for Intel-based Linux systems.
  See <URL:http://www.aa.net/~mtp/PCthreads.html> for more information.

- Christopher Provenzano <proven@mit.edu> has written a portable
  implementation of draft 8 of the IEEE Pthreads standard.  See
  <URL:http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/proven/pthreads.html> for further
  details, or fetch the software itself from
  <URL:ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/pthreads>.  Currently supported are
  i386/i486/Pentium processors running NetBSD 1.0, FreeBSD 1.1, Linux
  1.0, and BSDi 1.1; DECstations running Ultrix-4.2; SPARCstations
  running SunOS 4.1.3; and HP/PA machines running HP/UX-9.03.

  As far as I can see, development of this library has halted (at
  least temporarily), and it still contains many serious bugs.

- Georgia Tech's OS group has a fairly portable user-level threads
  implementation of the Mach Cthreads package.  It is called Cthreads,
  and can be found at
  <URL:ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/groups/systems/Falcon/>.
  It also contains the Falcon integrated monitoring system.

  It currently runs under SunOS 4.1.X, Irix 4.0.5, Irix 5.3, AIX
  3.2.5, Linux 1.0 and higher, and KSR1 and KSR2.  It is a fairly easy
  to port to other architectures.  Current ports in progress are
  Solaris 2.4 and AIX 4.X.

- The POSIX / Ada-Runtime Project (PART) has made available an
  implementation of draft 6 of the POSIX 1003.4a Pthreads
  specification, which runs under SunOS 4.x; the current release is
  version 1.20.  Available using anonymous ftp from
  <URL:ftp://ftp.cs.fsu.edu/pub/>.

- Elan Feingold has written a threads package called ethreads; I don't
  know anything about it, other than that it is available from
  <URL:ftp://frmap711.mathp7.jussieu.fr/pub/scratch/rideau/misc/threads/ethreads/ethreads.tgz>.

- Stephen Crane has written a `fairly portable' threads package, which
  runs under Sun 3, Sun 4, MIPS/RISCos, Linux, and 386BSD.  It is
  available via anonymous ftp from
  <URL:ftp://dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/rex/>, with documentation in
  the same directory named lwp.ps.gz.

- QuickThreads is a toolkit for building threads packages, written by
  David Keppel.  It is available via anonymous ftp from
  <URL:ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/qt-001.tar.Z>, with an
  accompanying tech report at
  <URL:ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/tr/1993/05/UW-CSE-93-05-06.PS.Z>.
  The code as distributed includes ports for the Alpha, x86, 88000,
  MIPS, SPARC, VAX, and KSR1.

- On CONVEX SPP Exemplar machines there is a Compiler Parallel Support
  Library (CPSlib), a library of thread management and synchronisation
  routines.  CPSlib is not compatible with anything else, but the
  interface is sufficiently similar to the Solaris threads or pthreads
  interface to allow straight porting.  One special feature of CPSlib
  is the (possible) distiction between "symmetric" and "asymmetric"
  parallelism.

A small number of vendors provide DCE threads packages for various
Unix systems.