Per-LWP POSIX Timers

In the Solaris 2.3 and 2.4 releases, the timer_create(3R) function returned a timer object whose timer ID was meaningful only within the calling LWP and whose expiration signals were delivered to that LWP. Because of this, the only threads that could use the POSIX timer facility were bound threads.

Even with this restricted use, POSIX timers in Solaris 2.3 and 2.4 multithreaded applications were unreliable about masking the resulting signals and delivering the associated value from the sigvent structure.

With the Solaris 2.5 release, an application that is compiled defining the macro _POSIX_PER_PROCESS_TIMERS, or with a value greater that 199506L for the symbol _POSIX_C_SOURCE, can create per-process timers.

Applications compiled with a release before the Solaris 2.5 release, or without the feature test macros, will continue to create per-LWP POSIX timers. In some future release, calls to create per-LWP timers will return per-process timers.

The timer IDs of per-process timers are usable from any LWP, and the expiration signals are generated for the process rather than directed to a specific LWP.

The per-process timers are deleted only by timer_delete(3R) or when the process terminates.