Per-Thread Alarms

In the Solaris Operating Environment 2.3 and 2.4 releases, a call to alarm(2) or setitimer(2) was meaningful only within the calling LWP. Such timers were deleted automatically when the creating LWP terminated. Because of this, the only threads that could use alarm() or setitimer() were bound threads.

Even with this restricted use, alarm() and setitimer() timers in Solaris Operating Environment 2.3 and 2.4 multithreaded applications were unreliable about masking the signals from the bound thread that issued these calls. When such masking was not required, then these two system calls worked reliably from bound threads.

With the Solaris Operating Environment 2.5 release, an application linking with -lpthread (POSIX) threads got per-process delivery of SIGALRM when calling alarm(). The SIGALRM generated by alarm() is generated for the process rather than directed to a specific LWP. Also, the alarm is reset when the process terminates.

Applications compiled with a release before the Solaris Operating Environment 2.5 release, or not linked with -lpthread, will continue to see a per-LWP delivery of signals generated by alarm() and setitimer()

Effective with the Solaris 9 Operating Environment, calls to alarm() or to setitimer(ITIMER_REAL) will cause the resulting SIGALRM signal to be sent to the process.