Chapter 4. Porting Solaris Applications

In this chapter

4.1	Preliminary Tasks	page 97
4.2	General Differences	page 100
4.3	Compilers	page 104
4.4	Linker	page 137
4.5	Porting Shell Scripts to Linux	page 146
4.6	Internationalization and Localization	page 147
4.7	Make	page 148
4.8	Debugger	page 154
4.9	Threads	page 155
4.10	Signals	page 169
4.11	System Calls	page 179
4.12	System Libraries	page 186
4.13	Solaris and Linux APIs	page 187
4.14	Scientific Library	page 199
4.15	Large Page Support	page 200
4.16	Some Solaris Nonportable Programming Practices	page 200
4.17	Summary	page 201

Porting is the step of the process during which modifications to the application take place. At this point, most if not all technical aspects and dependencies of the application should have already been uncovered during the scoping and analysis steps. The only thing that needs to be done now is to modify the source code so that it compiles and runs on the Linux platform.

During the porting process, software developers and porting personnel will likely encounter several differences between the UNIX operating system they are used to and the Linux 2.6 platform. For each topic discussed in this chapter, the most common differences are presented to explain what works and what does not work on the Linux 2.6 environment. The Solaris environment described in this chapter is based mostly on version 10 but should also be applicable to older versions of Solaris. Although this chapter discusses Solaris topics in some detail, it is assumed that porting engineers reading this chapter already have software development experience on Solaris.