Perl threads problems?

[Chris Ross <cross+netbsd%distal.com@localhost>]

  So, I spent a while building perl on my SS20 running netbsd-6.  When running
make test the first time, it eventually got to running 
cpan/Digest-MD5/t/threads,
which was chewing close to 200% CPU (2xHypersparc machine) for over 20
hours.  I killed it, and later restarted the testing for unrelated reasons.

  Today, the testing got to t/op/threads, and seemed to be locked similarly.  
Was
chewing about 100% CPU when I was looking at it, with well over 500 minutes
of CPU time.  I killed that, and it proceeded.  The section of my make test log 
shows:

t/op/threads-dirh..............................................ok
t/op/threads...................................................[1]   Terminated 
             /data/NetBSD/pkg...
# Failed at ./test.pl line 828
#      got ""
# expected "ok"
# PROG: 
# package Foo;
# sub new { bless {},shift }
# package main;
# use threads;
# use Scalar::Util qw(weaken);
# my $object = Foo->new;
# my $ref = $object;
# weaken $ref;
# threads->create(sub { $ref = $object } )->join; # $ref = $object causes 
problems
# print "ok";
# STATUS: 36608
FAILED at test 3
t/op/tie.......................................................ok
t/op/tie_fetch_count...........................................ok

  And strangely enough, an hour or so later it got back to 
cpan/Digest-MD5/t/threads,
and ran successfully in minimal time.


  Is this something that's a problem with the sparc port?  Or NetBSD in general?
Should I turn off support for threads in my sparc pkgsrc perl build?

          - Chris