04/09/23

Operating Systems

Web server application

Threads

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Definition Advantages of using threads

A basic unit of CPU utilization Responsiveness
o Private: Thread ID, program counter, register set, stack o Allowing a program to continue running even part of it is blocked or
o Shared: code section, data section, OS resources (IO & file) lengthy

Examples: Resource sharing

o Web browsers o Memory, resources
o Word processors
o Database engines Economy
o RPC!
o Fast

Versus Process: Scalability

o Time consuming o Threads may be running in parallel on processing cores
o Resource intensive
 04/09/23

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Multicore programming Types of parallelism

Multicore or multiprocessor systems putting pressure on programmers, Types of parallelism
challenges include:
o Dividing activities o Data parallelism
o Balance o Task parallelism
o Data splitting
o Data dependency
o Testing and debugging
As # of threads grows, so does architectural support for threading
o CPUs have cores as well as hardware threads
o Consider Oracle SPARC T4 with 8 cores, and 8 hardware threads per core
Parallelism implies a system can perform more than one task
simultaneously

Concurrency supports more than one task making progress

o Single processor / core, scheduler providing concurrency

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Multicore programming RPC using threads

Concurrent execution on single-core system:

Parallelism on a multi-core system:

 04/09/23

Operating Systems Operating Systems

User threads and kernel threads Multithreading models

User threads - management done by user-level threads library Many-to-One
Three primary thread libraries:
o POSIX Pthreads (kernel-level lib, user-level lib)
One-to-One
o Windows threads (kernel-level lib)
o Java threads (kernel-level lib)
Many-to-Many

Kernel threads - Supported by the Kernel

Asynchronous vs. synchronous threading

o Parent & child threads

Operating Systems Operating Systems

User level vs. kernel level threads 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 multicore

system because only one may be in kernel at a time

 Few systems currently use this model

 Examples:
o Solaris Green Threads
o GNU Portable Threads

 Used in very few systems.

 04/09/23

Operating Systems Operating Systems

One-to-one Thread operations and states

Each user-level thread maps to kernel thread Spawn (sinh sản)
o When a new process is spawned, a thread for that process
Creating a user-level thread creates a kernel is also spawned
thread
Block
More concurrency than many-to-one o When a thread needs to wait for an event, it will block

Number of threads per process sometimes Unblock

restricted due to overhead o When the event for which a thread is blocked occurs, the thread is
moved to the Ready queue
Examples
o Windows
o Linux Finish
o Solaris 9 and later
o When a thread completes, its register context and stacks are deallocate

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Many-to-many model Pthread: POSIX thread

Allows many user level threads to be
mapped to many kernel threads

Allows the operating system to create a

sufficient number of kernel threads

Two-level Model:
o Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user thread
to be bound to kernel thread
 04/09/23

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Pthreads code for joining 10 threads Java thread programming

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Windows multithread C program Implicit threading

Three methods explored
o Thread Pools (Win)
o OpenMP (C lib)
o Grand Central Dispatch (Mac OS, iOS)

Block is in “^{ }” - ˆ{ printf("I am a block"); } #pragma omp parallel for

for(i=0;i<N;i++) {
c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
}
 04/09/23

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Thread-local storage Windows threads data structures

Thread-local storage (TLS) allows each thread to have its own copy of data Implements the one-to-one mapping, kernel-level

Each thread contains

Useful when you do not have control over the thread creation process (i.e., o A thread id
when using a thread pool) o Register set representing state of processor
o Separate user and kernel stacks for when thread runs in
user mode or kernel mode
Different from local variables o Private data storage area used by run-time libraries and
o Local variables visible only during single function invocation dynamic link libraries (DLLs)
o TLS visible across function invocations
The register set, stacks, and private storage area are
known as the context of the thread
Similar to static data
o TLS is unique to each thread
Data structures:
o Execution thread block, kernel thread block and thread
environment block

Operating Systems Operating Systems

Thread termination Linux threads

Thread cancelation  Linux refers to them as tasks rather than threads
o Asynchronous cancellation
o Deferred cancellation  Thread creation is done through clone() system call

 clone() allows a child task to share the address space of the parent task (process)
Who is “target thread”? o Flags control behavior

 struct task_struct points to process data structures (shared or unique)

 04/09/23

Operating Systems

Questions?