Jerry Cooperstein at O’Reilly’s OnLamp talks about multithreading in the upcoming 2.6 kernel:
Recent advances in Linux’s threading implementation are expected to continue to ease migration from other Unix-like operating systems. These advancements have arrived with intense activity on two fronts. First, thread-handling improvements have greatly enhanced the kernel’s scalability even to thousands of threads. Second, there are now two fresh, competing implementations of the POSIX pthreads standard (NGPT and NPTL) set to replace the aging LinuxThreads library.