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+[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[meta license="""[[toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[meta title="Convert Hurd Libraries and Servers to pthreads"]]
+
+The Hurd was originally created at a time when the [pthreads
+standard](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/pthread.h.html)
+didn't exist yet.  Thus all Hurd servers and libraries are using the old
+[[cthreads|hurd/libcthreads]] package that came with [[microkernel/Mach]],
+which is not compatible with [[pthreads|hurd/libpthread]].
+
+Not only does that mean that people hacking on Hurd internals have to deal with
+a non-standard thread package, which nobody is familiar with. Although a
+pthreads implementation for the Hurd was created in the meantime, it's not
+possible to use both cthreads and pthreads in the same program. Consequently,
+pthreads can't presently be used in any Hurd servers -- including translators.
+
+Some work already has been done once on converting the Hurd servers and
+libraries to use pthreads, but that work hasn't been finished.  It is available
+as [[GNU_Savannah_task 5487]] and can of course be used to base the new work
+upon.
+
+The goal of this project is to have all the Hurd code use pthreads. Should any
+limitations in the existing pthreads implementation turn up that hinder this
+transition, they will have to be fixed as well.
+
+One possible option is creating a wrapper that implements the cthreads
+interfaces on top of pthreads, to ease the transition -- but it might very well
+turn out that it's easier to just change all the existing code to use pthreads
+directly.  This is up to the student.  Such a wrapper has been proposed as
+[[GNU_Savannah_task 7895]] and its implementation would be a useful
+starting-point.
+
+This project requires relatively little Hurd-specific knowledge. Experience
+with multithreaded programming in general and pthreads in particular is
+required, though.
+
+Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi)
+
+Exercise: Take some small piece of code using ctreads and convert it to
+pthreads.