A possible signal handling bug in Solaris

I know that combining threads and signals is a bad idea, but I just couldn't resist the temptation. It seemed like a nice solution until I've hit what seems to be a possible signal handling bug: sometimes the signal is not delivered on the alternate signal stack, even though a thread has requested so. You can read the full description here. I wonder whether I'll get a reply. In the mean-time, I'm abandoning threads in favor of multiple processes operating over a large shared memory segment.

Summary

It's a very busy time. I've passed (with the best grade) my final exam in Norwegian, and since then I'm busy with coding my PhD project. Have been busy with installing Solaris on some machines and bringing it into usable state (by installing many small but important packages), upgrading the compilers to latest versions, learning the dbx debugger, fighting with compiler bugs and discovering subtle but important restrictions of lock-free data structures.

Writing code also involves learning much about the C++ boost libraries and discovering some important weaknesses of C++ (this time: operators new and delete are class members which is very inconvenient if you want to impose external allocator onto existing classes). But I was also impressed how good the Sun's C++ compiler is when it comes to aggressive optimizations and heavy inlining of C++ code; this is very important with heavy template metaprogramming.

Each of these topics is interesting enough to deserve its own post, so expect more posts in the upcoming days.