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TBB on Sun Solaris*
By David Sekowski (Intel) (1 posts) on May 9, 2008 at 6:47 am
Hello, my name is Dave Sekowski. I am a program manager at Intel working on the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) project. This week I had an opportunity to talk with Chris Huson, one of the TBB developers who worked with Sun Microsystems to port TBB to Sun Solaris, about the collaborative effort to enable Solaris developers with TBB.
Dave Sekowski: We recently announcement with Sun Microsystems that we have made TBB available on Sun Solaris* using Sun Studio* compilers. What exactly went into the patches we made to TBB?
Chris Huson: One set of changes was the addition of using statements in the test system, to accommodate slight differences in the header files; most of these were incorporated as-is after some discussion. Sun also disabled the "warning is error" switch in the build. We use it to be pedantic about the code, but the Sun compiler found different things to warn about. A change disabling the switch for Sun was put into mainline. The other major change was to add SunOS to the preprocessor statements which were for Linux.
Dave Sekowski: In porting TBB to Sun Solaris with Sun Studio what needed to be changed and why?
Chris Huson: The change needing review on the Sun side was support for the stricter Sun support for standard library functions. Some of these functions are in the global namespace on some platforms, and in the std:: namespace on others (including Sun). Vladimir Polin incorporated Sun's modifications in a way that also supported older platforms, and Sun reviewed and approved those changes.
Dave Sekowski: Can you tell me a little about building it with Sun Studio compilers and working it into our regular build, test and release flow?
Chris Huson: The process was virtually identical to the Linux build, especially after we started using the Sun Studio Express compiler. The system is now being incorporated into our nightly build and test system, with no major problems so far.
Dave Sekowski: Do you have any additional comments on how it went?
Chris Huson: The changes were small, and incorporating them into the current version of TBB was pretty painless.
Dave Sekowski: Finally, what did you think about the collaboration with Sun to make this port happen?
Chris Huson: The Sun developers did a great job in porting TBB to their platform. Because they adhered to the spirit of the design of TBB, incorporating those changes was an easy job.
Categories: Multicore, Open Source, Threading Building Blocks
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