Week 11: Threads & Concurrency

Instructor: Dr. Farzana Jabeen

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Outline

▪ Overview
▪ Multicore Programming
▪ Multithreading Models
▪ Thread Libraries
▪ Implicit Threading
▪ Threading Issues
▪ Operating System Examples

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives

▪ Identify the basic components of a thread, and contrast threads

and processes
▪ Describe the benefits and challenges of designng
multithreaded applications
▪ Illustrate different approaches to implicit threading including
thread pools, fork-join, and Grand Central Dispatch
▪ Describe how the Windows and Linux operating systems
represent threads
▪ Design multithreaded applications using the Pthreads, Java,
and Windows threading APIs

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Motivation

▪ Most modern applications are multithreaded

▪ Threads run within application
▪ Multiple tasks with the application can be implemented by
separate threads
• Update display
• Fetch data
• Spell checking
• Answer a network request
▪ Process creation is heavy-weight while thread creation is
light-weight
▪ Can simplify code, increase efficiency
▪ Kernels are generally multithreaded

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Single and Multithreaded Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of MTP
• Web Browsers

• Web Servers

• Computer Games

• Text Editors

• IDE

• https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/process_threads_view.html

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multithreaded Server Architecture

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Benefits

▪ Responsiveness – may allow continued execution if part of

process is blocked, especially important for user interfaces
▪ Resource Sharing – threads share resources of process, easier
than shared memory or message passing
▪ Economy – cheaper than process creation, thread switching
lower overhead than context switching
▪ Scalability – process can take advantage of multicore
architectures

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multicore Programming

▪ Multicore or multiprocessor systems putting pressure on

programmers, challenges include:
• Dividing activities
• Balance
• Data splitting
• Data dependency
• Testing and debugging
▪ Parallelism implies a system can perform more than one task
simultaneously
▪ Concurrency supports more than one task making progress
• Single processor / core, scheduler providing concurrency

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Concurrency vs. Parallelism
▪ Concurrent execution on single-core system:

▪ Parallelism on a multi-core system:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multicore Programming

▪ Types of parallelism
• Data parallelism – distributes subsets of the same data
across multiple cores, same operation on each
• Task parallelism – distributing threads across cores, each
thread performing unique operation

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Data and Task Parallelism

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 User Threads and Kernel Threads

▪ User threads - management done by user-level threads library

▪ Three primary thread libraries:
• POSIX Pthreads
• Windows threads
• Java threads
▪ Kernel threads - Supported by the Kernel
▪ Examples – virtually all general -purpose operating systems, including:
• Windows
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• iOS
• Android

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 User and Kernel Threads

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multithreading Models

▪ Many-to-One

▪ One-to-One

▪ Many-to-Many

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Many-to-One

▪ Many user-level threads mapped to single kernel thread

▪ One thread blocking causes all to block
▪ Multiple threads may not run in parallel on muticore system because
only one may be in kernel at a time
▪ Few systems currently use this model
▪ Examples:
• Solaris Green Threads
• GNU Portable Threads

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 One-to-One

▪ Each user-level thread maps to kernel thread

▪ Creating a user-level thread creates a kernel thread
▪ More concurrency than many-to-one
▪ Number of threads per process sometimes restricted due to overhead
▪ Examples
• Windows
• Linux

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Many-to-Many Model
▪ Allows many user level threads to be mapped to many kernel threads
▪ Allows the operating system to create a sufficient number of kernel
threads
▪ Windows with the ThreadFiber package
▪ Otherwise not very common

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Two-level Model
▪ Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user thread to be bound to
kernel thread

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018