Red Hat sews Posix threading into new release

Threading improvements to the latest incarnation of Red Hat Inc.’s Enterprise Linux platform should make Java application server
and database users take notice. The addition should help narrow the gap between Unix and Linux for big business.

Red Hat’s inclusion of a native Posix threading library in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, released Wednesday, increases multithreading applications from
1,200 threads to 32,000, Red Hat said. The performance boost is one of several enhancements to the enterprise-grade platform, which includes support
for symmetric multiprocessing, more memory and security improvements. Red Hat has also used the same code base for RHEL3 as it has for its other
enterprise products, from the desktop to the mainframe.

“Customers want scalability and stability,” said Red Hat program director Mike Ferris at the Enterprise Linux Forum conference. “We are building from
the same code base. ISVs can focus on one set of code for the desktop all the way to the mainframe. If there are issues, when they are fixed on one
architecture, they are fixed on all architectures.”