Building an Open-source Solaris-compatible Threads Library

Applications that use the Solaris threads application programming interface (API), e.g. thr_create(), mutex_lock(), cond_signal(), etc. [1], are generally non-portable. Thus to port an application that uses Solaris threads to another platform will require some degree of work. Solaris now supports the POSIX threads API as well as the Solaris threads API. Therefore to make a Solaris threaded application portable, the ideal is to re-code the threaded part of the application to use POSIX threads. However, the Solaris threads API has some unique functionality over the POSIX threads API. This can make the task of converting a Solaris threaded application to use POSIX threads be very time-consuming and hence expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. This paper outlines an alternative approach to porting applications that use the Solaris threads API, which is to use an open-source Solaris-compatible threads library that layers upon a POSIX threads library. The objective is to allow an otherwise-portable Solaris threaded application to be ported by simply rebuilding on the target platform using the Solaris-compatible threads library and header-files. This reduces the cost of porting the application.