Features for the Developer

For application developers, the Solaris operating environment includes a variety of toolkits and features to simplify the development of complex applications with graphical user interfaces.

• Multithreaded (MT) kernel. MT provides for a symmetric multiprocessing kernel where multiple processors can execute the kernel at the same time. Applications can be structured as several independent computations rather than as one thread of control. Independent computations execute more efficiently because the operating system handles the interleaving of the independent operations. This benefit of multithreading is known as application concurrency.

• STREAMS. STREAMS is a flexible framework for character input and output (I/O) that has been implemented throughout SVR4. It is easily customized for applications.

• Expanded fundamental types. ID data types (uid, pid, device IDs, and the like) and certain other data types are expanded to 32 bits. This improves the scalability of the operating system in large systems and for use in large organizations.

• Device driver interfaces. There are three types of interfaces for Solaris device drivers: Device Kernel Interface (DKI) Device Driver Interface/Device Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI), and Sun Device Driver Interface (Sun DDI). The DDI/DKI conformance means that device drivers have better source and binary compatibility across SPARC platforms so developers can write one driver to support a peripheral on all SPARC platforms.

• Automatic device driver loading. This makes drivers easier to install and devices easier to access.

• Dynamic linking. The Solaris application environment supports static and dynamic linking of libraries. The linker uses the version numbers of the libraries and executables to link applications with the proper libraries, routines, and interfaces.