Per-LWP POSIX Timers

In the Solaris 2.3 and 2.4 releases, the timer_create(3RT) function returned a timer object with a timer ID meaningful only within the calling LWP and with expiration signals 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 the Solaris 2.3 and 2.4 releases for multithreaded applications were unreliable about masking the resulting signals and delivering the associated value from the sigvent structure.

Beginning 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.

Effective with the Solaris 9 Operating Environment, all timers are per-process except for the virtual time and profile interval timers (see setitimer(2) for ITIMER_VIRTUAL and ITIMER_PROF), which remain per-LWP.

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(3RT) or when the process terminates.