Port Windows IPC apps to Linux, Part 1: Processes and threads

Today many global businesses and services are going open source -- all the major corporate players in the industry are pushing for it. This trend has spurred a major migration exercise in which lots of existing products maintained for various platforms (Windows, OS2, Solaris, etc.) will be ported to open source Linux platforms.

Many applications are designed without considering the need to port them to Linux. This has the potential to be a porting nightmare, but it doesn't have to be. The goal of this series of articles is to help you migrate complex applications involving IPC and threading primitives from Windows to Linux. We share our experiences in moving these critical Windows IPC applications, applications that include multithreaded apps that require thread synchronization and multiprocess apps that require interprocess synchronization.

In short, think of this series as a mapping document -- it provides mapping of various Windows calls to Linux calls related to threads, processes, and interprocess communication elements (mutexes, semaphores, etc.). We've divided the mapping into three chunks:

• Part 1 deals with processes and threads.
• Part 2 handles semaphores and events.
• Part 3 covers mutexes, critical sections, and wait functions.

Processes

Basic execution units in Windows and Linux are different. In Windows, the thread is the basic execution unit, and the process is a container that holds this thread.