GNU Portable Threads

{{Infobox software

| name = GNU Portable Threads

| logo= GNU Pth logo.jpg

| logo_size = 170px

| author = Ralf S. Engelschall

| developer =

| released = {{Start date and age|1999|07|16}}

| latest_release_version = 2.0.7

| latest_release_date = {{Start date and age|2006|06|08}}

| operating_system = POSIX

| genre = Runtime library

| license = LGPL

}}

GNU Pth (Portable Threads) is a POSIX/ANSI-C based user space thread library for UNIX platforms that provides priority-based scheduling for multithreading applications. GNU Pth targets for a high degree of portability. It is part of the GNU Project.{{cite web|url=http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU|title=GNU|accessdate=25 June 2012}}

Pth also provides API emulation for POSIX threads for backward compatibility.

GNU Pth uses an N:1 mapping to kernel-space threads, i.e., the scheduling is done completely by the GNU Pth library and the kernel itself is not aware of the N threads in user-space. Because of this there is no possibility to utilize SMP as kernel dispatching would be necessary.