Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment

ptg10805159

Preface xxiii

area of differences between these two versions is the threads subsystem. Between Linux

2.4 and Linux 2.6, the threads implementation was changed to the Native POSIX Thread

Library(NPTL).NPTL makes threads on Linux behave morelike threads on the other

systems.

In total, this edition includes morethan 70 new interfaces, including interfaces to

handle asynchronous I/O, spin locks, barriers, and POSIX semaphores. Most obsolete

interfaces areremoved, except for a few ubiquitous ones.

Acknowledgments

Many readers have e-mailed comments and bug reports on the second edition. My

thanks to them for improving the accuracy of the information presented. The following

people werethe first to make a particular suggestion or point out a specific error: Seth

Arnold, Luke Bakken, Rick Ballard, Johannes Bittner,David Bronder,Vlad Buslov,Peter

Butler,Yuching Chen, Mike Cheng, Jim Collins, Bob Cousins, Will Dennis, Thomas

Dickey,Loïc Domaigné, Igor Fuksman, Alex Gezerlis, M. Scott Gordon, Timothy Goya,

Tony Graham, Michael Hobgood, Michael Kerrisk, Youngho Kwon, RichardLi, Xueke

Liu, Yun Long, Dan McGregor,Dylan McNamee, Greg Miller,Simon Morgan, Harry

Newton, Jim Oldfield, Scott Parish, Zvezdan Petkovic, David Reiss, Konstantinos

Sakoutis, David Smoot, David Somers, Andriy Tkachuk, Nathan Weeks, Florian

Weimer,Qingyang Xu, and Michael Zalokar.

The technical reviewers improved the accuracy of the information presented.

Thanks to Steve Albert, Bogdan Barbu, and Robert Day.Special thanks to GeoffClare

and Andrew Josey for providing insights into the Single UNIX Specification and

helping to improve the accuracy of Chapter 2. Also, thanks to Ken Thompson for

answering history questions.

Once again, the staff at Addison-Wesley was great to work with. Thanks to Kim

Boedigheimer,Romny French, John Fuller,Jessica Goldstein, Julie Nahil, and Debra

Williams-Cauley.Inaddition, thanks to Jill Hobbs for providing her copyediting

expertise this time around.

Finally,thanks to my family for their understanding while I spent so much time

working on this updated edition.

As before, the source code presented here is available atwww.apuebook.com.I

welcome e-mail from any readers with comments, suggestions, or bug fixes.

Warren, New Jersey Stephen A. Rago

January 2013 [email protected]