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Programming Interfaces Guide     Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Memory and CPU Management

2.  Session Description Protocol API

3.  Process Scheduler

4.  Locality Group APIs

5.  Input/Output Interfaces

6.  Interprocess Communication

7.  Socket Interfaces

8.  Programming With XTI and TLI

9.  Packet Filtering Hooks

10.  Transport Selection and Name-to-Address Mapping

11.  Real-time Programming and Administration

12.  The Oracle Solaris ABI and ABI Tools

What is the Oracle Solaris ABI?

Defining the Oracle Solaris ABI

Symbol Versioning in Oracle Solaris Libraries

Using Symbol Versioning to Label the Oracle Solaris ABI

Oracle Solaris ABI Tools

appcert Utility

What appcert Checks

Private Symbol Usage

Static Linking

Unbound Symbols

What appcert Does Not Check

Working with appcert

appcert Options

Using appcert for Application Triage

appcert Results

Correcting Problems Reported by appcert

Using apptrace for Application Verification

Application Verification

Running apptrace

Interpreting apptrace Output

A.  UNIX Domain Sockets

Index

What is the Oracle Solaris ABI?

The Oracle Solaris ABI is the set of supported run-time interfaces that are available for an application to use with the Oracle Solaris operating system. The most important components of the ABI are in the following list:

The main component of the Oracle Solaris ABI is the set of system library interfaces. The term ABI in this chapter refers only to that component. The ABI contains exclusively C language interfaces, as C is the only language for which the Oracle Solaris operating system provides interfaces.

C source code that is written to the Oracle Solaris API (Application Programming Interface) is transformed by the C compiler into a binary for one of four ABI versions. The versions are:

While the ABI is very similar to the API, the source compilation process introduces several important differences:

For these reasons, source-level (API) compatibility does not provide a sufficient expectation of binary compatibility across Oracle Solaris releases.

The Oracle Solaris ABI is made up of the supported interfaces provided by the operating system. Some of the interfaces that are available in the system are intended for the exclusive use of the operating system. These exclusive interfaces are not available for use by an application. Prior to the SunOS 5.6 release, all of the interfaces in Oracle Solaris libraries were available for application developers to use. With the library symbol scoping technology available in the Oracle Solaris link editor, interfaces not intended for use outside of a library have their scope reduced to be purely local to the library. See the Linker and Libraries Guide for details. Due to system requirements, not all private interfaces can have such a reduced scope. These interfaces are labeled private, and are not included in the Oracle Solaris ABI.