Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Building Berkeley DB for UNIX systems

Solaris

1. I can't compile and run multithreaded applications.

   Special compile-time flags and additional libraries are required when compiling threaded applications on Solaris. If you are compiling a threaded application, you must compile with the D_REENTRANT flag and link with the libpthread.a or libthread.a libraries:

   cc -mt ...
   cc -D_REENTRANT ... -lthread
   cc -D_REENTRANT ... -lpthread

   The Berkeley DB library will automatically build with the correct options.

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2. I've installed gcc on my Solaris system, but configuration fails because the compiler doesn't work.

   On some versions of Solaris, there is a cc executable in the user's path, but all it does is display an error message and fail:

   % which cc
   /usr/ucb/cc
   % cc
   /usr/ucb/cc: language optional software package not installed

   Because Berkeley DB always uses the native compiler in preference to gcc, this is a fatal error. If the error message you are seeing is the following, then this may be the problem:

   checking whether the C compiler (cc -O) works... no
   configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.

   The simplest workaround is to set your CC environment variable to the system compiler and reconfigure; for example:

   env CC=gcc ../dist/configure

   If you are using the --configure-cxx option, you may also want to specify a C++ compiler, for example the following:

   env CC=gcc CCC=g++ ../dist/configure

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3. I get the error "libc internal error: _rmutex_unlock: rmutex not held", followed by a core dump when running threaded or JAVA programs.

   This is a known bug in Solaris 2.5 and it is fixed by Sun patch 103187-25.

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4. I get error reports of nonexistent files, corrupted metadata pages and core dumps.

   Solaris 7 contains a bug in the threading libraries (-lpthread, -lthread), which causes the wrong version of the pwrite routine to be linked into the application if the thread library is linked in after the C library. The result will be that the pwrite function is called rather than the pwrite64. To work around the problem, use an explicit link order when creating your application.

   Sun Microsystems is tracking this problem with Bug Id's 4291109 and 4267207, and patch 106980-09 to Solaris 7 fixes the problem:

   Bug Id: 4291109
   Duplicate of: 4267207
   Category: library
   Subcategory: libthread
   State: closed
   Synopsis: pwrite64 mapped to pwrite
   Description:
   When libthread is linked after libc, there is a table of functions in
   libthread that gets "wired into" libc via _libc_threads_interface().
   The table in libthread is wrong in both Solaris 7 and on28_35 for the
   TI_PWRITE64 row (see near the end).

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5. During configuration, I see a message that large file support has been turned off.

   The Solaris 8 system include files redefine "open" when big-file support (the HAVE_FILE_OFFSET_BITS and _FILE_OFFSET_BITS #defines) is enabled. This causes problems when compiling for C++, where "open" is a legal identifier used in the Berkeley DB C++ API. For this reason, we automatically turn off big-file support when Berkeley DB is configured with a C++ API. This should not be a problem for applications unless there is a need to create databases larger than 2GB.

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