[Techtalk] multithreaded C program

[Jeannette]

Hey Chix!

I am trying to port a stress test from C for Windows (that probably has an
official name - I have no idea what it is) to both Solaris and Linux.

Since I knew I had to do both (I did Solaris first), I tried to keep it
ANSI C/Posix threads, but I am running into a problem running the program
on Linux that I didn't have in Solaris. The basic structure of the program
is this: According to parameters provided by the user of X disks to be
exercised and Y threads per file,

main program
|
|-> launches thread to maintain statistics and time test
|
|-> launches X threads (one per disk)
|            |
|            |-> each of these threads launches Y threads which
|            |   continuously do reads +/or writes to their
|	     |   assigned addresses in their specified drive
|            |
|            |waits to join Y threads when time is up
| waits to join X threads when time is up


So, I have two problems with this code in Linux that I don't have in
Solaris:

1) I can't open more than one fstream at a time. In the Solaris man page
for fwrite, it says that you are limited by OPEN_MAX (max number of files
a process can have open), which is defined in limits.h as 256 (and
possibly further limited by a POSIX_OPEN_MAX of 16).  In Linux, I can't
find a similar defintion. Does anyone know if there is a limit of 1 open
file per process or if I need to do something to get around what seems to
be this limitation?

2) My second problem probably derives from the first, but I will mention
it anyway in case anyone can help me solve it; it is with the Y threads.
They are each calculated to have non-overlapping sections of the drive
that they do their reads and writes on; but, when the program tries open a
second file pointer to the same file, I get a seg fault (as above with
file pointers to different files).

Some technical details:
compilers used:
gcc 2.96 on RH 7.0
gcc 2.95.2 on Caldera 3.1
gcc 2.95.3 on SuSE 7.2
(all failed)

WorkShop Copilers 5.0 98/12/15 C 5.0 on Solaris 8 (x86)
(works the way I want it to)

compiled using:
cc -mt -o fracture fracture.o lx_procs.o lx_io.o -lpthread

Thanks for any help or pointers you can give me!

Jeannette