Per-Thread Alarms

In the Solaris 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 these were bound threads.

Even with this restricted use, alarm() and setitimer() timers in Solaris 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 2.5 release, an application linking with -lpthread (POSIX) threads will get 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 2.5 release, or not linked with -lpthread, will continue to see a per-LWP delivery of signals generated by alarm() and setitimer().

In some future release, calls to alarm() or to setitimer() with the ITIMER_REAL flag will cause the resulting SIGALRM to be sent to the process. For other flags, setitmer() will continue to be per-LWP. Flags other than the ITIMER_REAL flag, used by setitimer(), will continue to result in the generated signal being delivered to the LWP that issued the call, and so are usable only from bound threads.