• 1. Introduction
• 1.1. Features
• 2. New in this release
• 2.1. New Features
• 2.2. Enhancements
• 2.3. Optimizations
• 2.4. Documentation
• 2.5. Bug Fixes
• 2.6. Known Bugs
• 3. About
• 3.1. Operating System Support
• 3.2. Documentation
• 3.3. Support
• 4. Errata

1. Introduction

Welcome to Lunchbox, a C++ library for multi-threaded programming. Lunchbox 1.6 adds major new features, most notably support for serializable boost::any-like data.

Lunchbox 1.6 is a feature release based on the 1.4 Lunchbox API. It is intended for all application developers creating high-preformance multi-threaded programs. Lunchbox 1.6 beta can be retrieved by downloading the source code or one of the precompiled packages.

1.1. Features

Lunchbox provides the following major features to facilitate the development and deployment of multi-threaded applications:

• OS Abstraction: Utility classes abstracting common operating systems features, e.g., threads, locks, memory maps, shared library loading and condition variables.
• High-Performance Primitives: Thread-safe utilities tuned for performance, e.g., atomic variables, spin locks and lock-free containers.
• Utility classes: Helper primitives which are not in the standard library, e.g., logging, pools and random number generation.

2. New in this release

Lunchbox 1.6 contains the following features, enhancements, bug fixes and documentation changes over the co::base functionality found in Equalizer 1.2.1:

2.1. New Features

• Any, a serializable derivative of boost::any
• daemonize function to create daemon programs
• byteswap template function to perform little-to-big-endian or big-to-little endian swapping

2.2. Enhancements

• New compiler support: XLC 9 on PowerPC, gcc 4.1.
• Copyable (move semantics) ScopedMutex
• Method to directly redirect Log to a file
• Improved Buffer, uint128_t and LFVector APIs
• Servus get API for announced keys

2.3. Optimizations

2.4. Documentation

The following documentation has been added or substantially improved since the last release:

• API documentation for the public Lunchbox API

2.5. Bug Fixes

Lunchbox 1.6 includes various bugfixes over the 1.4 release, including the following:

• 9: Memory leak in Thread::setAffinity
• 4: sleep is not signal-safe

2.6. Known Bugs

The following bugs were known at release time. Please file a Bug Report if you find any other issue with this release.

• 6: Condition::timedWait does not wait on early RHEL 6.1 versions

3. About

Lunchbox is a cross-platform library, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system.

3.1. Operating System Support

Lunchbox uses CMake to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested:

• Linux: Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, RHEL 6 (Makefile, i386, x64)
• Windows: 7 (Visual Studio 2008, i386, x64)
• Mac OS X: 10.8 (Makefile, XCode, i386, x64)

3.2. Documentation

The API documentation can be found on eyescale.github.com. As with any open source project, the available source code, in particular the unit tests provide a reference for developing applications.

3.3. Support

Technical questions can be posted to the Equalizer Developer Mailing List, or directly to info@equalizergraphics.com.

Commercial support, custom software development and porting services are available from Eyescale. Please contact info@eyescale.ch for further information.

4. Errata