I've been waiting ages for decent threads on PowerPC. There's a glibc bug about it, with a way-too-low priority. What gives?
If this has something to do with a Debian release, well, just don't release PowerPC in that case. It's not ready if it still uses the horrid old pre-NPTL threads. BTW, gcc-3.4 is working quite well for me. Not that it should be needed though; I'd have expected glibc to be getting at thread-local data via functions.
