After talking with Tom we agreed that since external thread handling is severely broken right now, this patch can only be a net gain. It also does allow Robert's test to run successfully every time, so I think that's very promising.
The test is also committed, but not part of the main suite. It needs to be cleaned up, made less noisy, etc. It's certainly excercising the code, however...and it's pretty brutal about it. The patch committed to HEAD is attached. Robert: I'll pull another dump for you if you can't apply this patch to the earlier dump. - Charlie
nonruby_thread_adoption-HEAD.patch
Description: Binary data
