Thread (computing)

In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest

sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed
independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the
operating system.[1] The implementation of threads and processes
differs between operating systems, but in most cases a thread is a
component of a process. The multiple threads of a given process
may be executed concurrently (via multithreading capabilities),
sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do
not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process
share its executable code and the values of its dynamically
allocated variables and non-thread-local global variables at any
given time.
A process with two threads of
execution, running on one processor

Contents
History
Processes, kernel threads, user threads, and fibers
Processes
Kernel threads
User threads
Fibers
Threads vis-à-vis processes
Scheduling
Preemptive vis-à-vis cooperative scheduling
Single- vis-à-vis multi-processor systems
Threading models Program vs. Process vs. Thread
Scheduling, Preemption, Context Switching
Single-threaded vs multithreaded programs
Threads and data synchronization
Thread pools
Multithreaded programs vs single-threaded programs
pros and cons
Programming language support
See also
References
Further reading

History
Threads made an early appearance under the name of "tasks" in OS/360 Multiprogramming with a Variable
Number of Tasks (MVT) in 1967. Saltzer (1966) credits Victor A. Vyssotsky with the term "thread".[2]
Popularity of threading has increased around 2003, as the growth of the CPU frequency was replaced with
the growth of number of cores, in turn requiring concurrency to utilize multiple cores.[3]

Processes, kernel threads, user threads, and fibers

Scheduling can be done at the kernel level or user level, and multitasking can be done preemptively or
cooperatively. This yields a variety of related concepts.

Processes

At the kernel level, a process contains one or more kernel threads, which share the process's resources,
such as memory and file handles – a process is a unit of resources, while a thread is a unit of scheduling
and execution. Kernel scheduling is typically uniformly done preemptively or, less commonly,
cooperatively. At the user level a process such as a runtime system can itself schedule multiple threads of
execution. If these do not share data, as in Erlang, they are usually analogously called processes,[4] while if
they share data they are usually called (user) threads, particularly if preemptively scheduled. Cooperatively
scheduled user threads are known as fibers; different processes may schedule user threads differently. User
threads may be executed by kernel threads in various ways (one-to-one, many-to-one, many-to-many). The
term "light-weight process" variously refers to user threads or to kernel mechanisms for scheduling user
threads onto kernel threads.

A process is a "heavyweight" unit of kernel scheduling, as creating, destroying, and switching processes is
relatively expensive. Processes own resources allocated by the operating system. Resources include
memory (for both code and data), file handles, sockets, device handles, windows, and a process control
block. Processes are isolated by process isolation, and do not share address spaces or file resources except
through explicit methods such as inheriting file handles or shared memory segments, or mapping the same
file in a shared way – see interprocess communication. Creating or destroying a process is relatively
expensive, as resources must be acquired or released. Processes are typically preemptively multitasked, and
process switching is relatively expensive, beyond basic cost of context switching, due to issues such as
cache flushing (in particular, process switching changes virtual memory addressing, causing invalidation
and thus flushing of an untagged translation lookaside buffer, notably on x86).

Kernel threads

A kernel thread is a "lightweight" unit of kernel scheduling. At least one kernel thread exists within each
process. If multiple kernel threads exist within a process, then they share the same memory and file
resources. Kernel threads are preemptively multitasked if the operating system's process scheduler is
preemptive. Kernel threads do not own resources except for a stack, a copy of the registers including the
program counter, and thread-local storage (if any), and are thus relatively cheap to create and destroy.
Thread switching is also relatively cheap: it requires a context switch (saving and restoring registers and
stack pointer), but does not change virtual memory and is thus cache-friendly (leaving TLB valid). The
kernel can assign one thread to each logical core in a system (because each processor splits itself up into
multiple logical cores if it supports multithreading, or only supports one logical core per physical core if it
does not), and can swap out threads that get blocked. However, kernel threads take much longer than user
threads to be swapped.

User threads
Threads are sometimes implemented in userspace libraries, thus called user threads. The kernel is unaware
of them, so they are managed and scheduled in userspace. Some implementations base their user threads on
top of several kernel threads, to benefit from multi-processor machines (M:N model). User threads as
implemented by virtual machines are also called green threads.

As user thread implementations are typically entirely in userspace, context switching between user threads
within the same process is extremely efficient because it does not require any interaction with the kernel at
all: a context switch can be performed by locally saving the CPU registers used by the currently executing
user thread or fiber and then loading the registers required by the user thread or fiber to be executed. Since
scheduling occurs in userspace, the scheduling policy can be more easily tailored to the requirements of the
program's workload.

However, the use of blocking system calls in user threads (as opposed to kernel threads) can be
problematic. If a user thread or a fiber performs a system call that blocks, the other user threads and fibers in
the process are unable to run until the system call returns. A typical example of this problem is when
performing I/O: most programs are written to perform I/O synchronously. When an I/O operation is
initiated, a system call is made, and does not return until the I/O operation has been completed. In the
intervening period, the entire process is "blocked" by the kernel and cannot run, which starves other user
threads and fibers in the same process from executing.

A common solution to this problem (used, in particular, by many of green threads implementations) is
providing an I/O API that implements an interface that blocks the calling thread, rather than the entire
process, by using non-blocking I/O internally, and scheduling another user thread or fiber while the I/O
operation is in progress. Similar solutions can be provided for other blocking system calls. Alternatively, the
program can be written to avoid the use of synchronous I/O or other blocking system calls (in particular,
using non-blocking I/O, including lambda continuations and/or async/await primitives[5]).

Fibers

Fibers are an even lighter unit of scheduling which are cooperatively scheduled: a running fiber must
explicitly "yield" to allow another fiber to run, which makes their implementation much easier than kernel
or user threads. A fiber can be scheduled to run in any thread in the same process. This permits applications
to gain performance improvements by managing scheduling themselves, instead of relying on the kernel
scheduler (which may not be tuned for the application). Parallel programming environments such as
OpenMP typically implement their tasks through fibers. Closely related to fibers are coroutines, with the
distinction being that coroutines are a language-level construct, while fibers are a system-level construct.

Threads vis-à-vis processes

Threads differ from traditional multitasking operating-system processes in several ways:

processes are typically independent, while threads exist as subsets of a process

processes carry considerably more state information than threads, whereas multiple threads
within a process share process state as well as memory and other resources
processes have separate address spaces, whereas threads share their address space
processes interact only through system-provided inter-process communication mechanisms
context switching between threads in the same process typically occurs faster than context
switching between processes
Systems such as Windows NT and OS/2 are said to have cheap threads and expensive processes; in other
operating systems there is not so great a difference except in the cost of an address-space switch, which on
some architectures (notably x86) results in a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) flush.

Advantages and disadvantages of threads vs processes include:

Lower resource consumption of threads: using threads, an application can operate using
fewer resources than it would need when using multiple processes.
Simplified sharing and communication of threads: unlike processes, which require a
message passing or shared memory mechanism to perform inter-process communication
(IPC), threads can communicate through data, code and files they already share.
Thread crashes a process: due to threads sharing the same address space, an illegal
operation performed by a thread can crash the entire process; therefore, one misbehaving
thread can disrupt the processing of all the other threads in the application.

Scheduling

Preemptive vis-à-vis cooperative scheduling

Operating systems schedule threads either preemptively or cooperatively. Multi-user operating systems
generally favor preemptive multithreading for its finer-grained control over execution time via context
switching. However, preemptive scheduling may context-switch threads at moments unanticipated by
programmers, thus causing lock convoy, priority inversion, or other side-effects. In contrast, cooperative
multithreading relies on threads to relinquish control of execution, thus ensuring that threads run to
completion. This can cause problems if a cooperatively multitasked thread blocks by waiting on a resource
or if it starves other threads by not yielding control of execution during intensive computation.

Single- vis-à-vis multi-processor systems

Until the early 2000s, most desktop computers had only one single-core CPU, with no support for
hardware threads, although threads were still used on such computers because switching between threads
was generally still quicker than full-process context switches. In 2002, Intel added support for simultaneous
multithreading to the Pentium 4 processor, under the name hyper-threading; in 2005, they introduced the
dual-core Pentium D processor and AMD introduced the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Systems with a single processor generally implement multithreading by time slicing: the central processing
unit (CPU) switches between different software threads. This context switching usually occurs frequently
enough that users perceive the threads or tasks as running in parallel (for popular server/desktop operating
systems, maximum time slice of a thread, when other threads are waiting, is often limited to 100-200ms).
On a multiprocessor or multi-core system, multiple threads can execute in parallel, with every processor or
core executing a separate thread simultaneously; on a processor or core with hardware threads, separate
software threads can also be executed concurrently by separate hardware threads.

Threading models

1:1 (kernel-level threading)

Threads created by the user in a 1:1 correspondence with schedulable entities in the kernel[6] are the
simplest possible threading implementation. OS/2 and Win32 used this approach from the start, while on
Linux the usual C library implements this approach (via the NPTL or older LinuxThreads). This approach
is also used by Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, macOS, and iOS.

N:1 (user-level threading)

An N:1 model implies that all application-level threads map to one kernel-level scheduled entity;[6] the
kernel has no knowledge of the application threads. With this approach, context switching can be done very
quickly and, in addition, it can be implemented even on simple kernels which do not support threading.
One of the major drawbacks, however, is that it cannot benefit from the hardware acceleration on
multithreaded processors or multi-processor computers: there is never more than one thread being
scheduled at the same time.[6] For example: If one of the threads needs to execute an I/O request, the whole
process is blocked and the threading advantage cannot be used. The GNU Portable Threads uses User-
level threading, as does State Threads.

M:N (hybrid threading)

M:N maps some M number of application threads onto some N number of kernel entities,[6] or "virtual
processors." This is a compromise between kernel-level ("1:1") and user-level ("N:1") threading. In
general, "M:N" threading systems are more complex to implement than either kernel or user threads,
because changes to both kernel and user-space code are required. In the M:N implementation, the threading
library is responsible for scheduling user threads on the available schedulable entities; this makes context
switching of threads very fast, as it avoids system calls. However, this increases complexity and the
likelihood of priority inversion, as well as suboptimal scheduling without extensive (and expensive)
coordination between the userland scheduler and the kernel scheduler.

Hybrid implementation examples

Scheduler activations used by older versions of the NetBSD native POSIX threads library
implementation (an M:N model as opposed to a 1:1 kernel or userspace implementation
model)
Light-weight processes used by older versions of the Solaris operating system
Marcel from the PM2 project.
The OS for the Tera-Cray MTA-2
Microsoft Windows 7 user-mode scheduling[7][8]
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) for the language Haskell uses lightweight threads
which are scheduled on operating system threads.

History of threading models in Unix systems

SunOS 4.x implemented light-weight processes or LWPs. NetBSD 2.x+, and DragonFly BSD implement
LWPs as kernel threads (1:1 model). SunOS 5.2 through SunOS 5.8 as well as NetBSD 2 to NetBSD 4
implemented a two level model, multiplexing one or more user level threads on each kernel thread (M:N
model). SunOS 5.9 and later, as well as NetBSD 5 eliminated user threads support, returning to a 1:1
model.[9] FreeBSD 5 implemented M:N model. FreeBSD 6 supported both 1:1 and M:N, users could
choose which one should be used with a given program using /etc/libmap.conf. Starting with FreeBSD 7,
the 1:1 became the default. FreeBSD 8 no longer supports the M:N model.
Single-threaded vs multithreaded programs
In computer programming, single-threading is the processing of one command at a time.[10] In the formal
analysis of the variables' semantics and process state, the term single threading can be used differently to
mean "backtracking within a single thread", which is common in the functional programming
community.[11]

Multithreading is mainly found in multitasking operating systems. Multithreading is a widespread

programming and execution model that allows multiple threads to exist within the context of one process.
These threads share the process's resources, but are able to execute independently. The threaded
programming model provides developers with a useful abstraction of concurrent execution. Multithreading
can also be applied to one process to enable parallel execution on a multiprocessing system.

Multithreading libraries tend to provide a function call to create a new thread, which takes a function as a
parameter. A concurrent thread is then created which starts running the passed function and ends when the
function returns. The thread libraries also offer data synchronization functions.

Threads and data synchronization

Threads in the same process share the same address space. This allows concurrently running code to couple
tightly and conveniently exchange data without the overhead or complexity of an IPC. When shared
between threads, however, even simple data structures become prone to race conditions if they require more
than one CPU instruction to update: two threads may end up attempting to update the data structure at the
same time and find it unexpectedly changing underfoot. Bugs caused by race conditions can be very
difficult to reproduce and isolate.

To prevent this, threading application programming interfaces (APIs) offer synchronization primitives such
as mutexes to lock data structures against concurrent access. On uniprocessor systems, a thread running into
a locked mutex must sleep and hence trigger a context switch. On multi-processor systems, the thread may
instead poll the mutex in a spinlock. Both of these may sap performance and force processors in symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) systems to contend for the memory bus, especially if the granularity of the locking
is too fine.

Other synchronization APIs include condition variables, critical sections, semaphores, and monitors.

Thread pools

A popular programming pattern involving threads is that of thread pools where a set number of threads are
created at startup that then wait for a task to be assigned. When a new task arrives, it wakes up, completes
the task and goes back to waiting. This avoids the relatively expensive thread creation and destruction
functions for every task performed and takes thread management out of the application developer's hand
and leaves it to a library or the operating system that is better suited to optimize thread management.

Multithreaded programs vs single-threaded programs pros and cons

Multithreaded applications have the following advantages vs single-threaded ones:

Responsiveness: multithreading can allow an application to remain responsive to input. In a

one-thread program, if the main execution thread blocks on a long-running task, the entire
 application can appear to freeze. By moving such long-running tasks to a worker thread that
runs concurrently with the main execution thread, it is possible for the application to remain
responsive to user input while executing tasks in the background. On the other hand, in most
cases multithreading is not the only way to keep a program responsive, with non-blocking
I/O and/or Unix signals being available for obtaining similar results.[12]
Parallelization: applications looking to use multicore or multi-CPU systems can use
multithreading to split data and tasks into parallel subtasks and let the underlying
architecture manage how the threads run, either concurrently on one core or in parallel on
multiple cores. GPU computing environments like CUDA and OpenCL use the
multithreading model where dozens to hundreds of threads run in parallel across data on a
large number of cores. This, in turn, enables better system utilization, and (provided that
synchronization costs don't eat the benefits up), can provide faster program execution.

Multithreaded applications have the following drawbacks:

Synchronization complexity and related bugs: when using shared resources typical for
threaded programs, the programmer must be careful to avoid race conditions and other non-
intuitive behaviors. In order for data to be correctly manipulated, threads will often need to
rendezvous in time in order to process the data in the correct order. Threads may also
require mutually exclusive operations (often implemented using mutexes) to prevent
common data from being read or overwritten in one thread while being modified by another.
Careless use of such primitives can lead to deadlocks, livelocks or races over resources. As
Edward A. Lee has wrote: "Although threads seem to be a small step from sequential
computation, in fact, they represent a huge step. They discard the most essential and
appealing properties of sequential computation: understandability, predictability, and
determinism. Threads, as a model of computation, are wildly non-deterministic, and the job
of the programmer becomes one of pruning that nondeterminism."[13]
Being untestable. In general, multithreaded programs are non-deterministic, and as a result,
are untestable. In other words, a multithreaded program can easily have bugs which never
manifest on a test system, manifesting only in production.[14][13] This can be alleviated by
restricting inter-thread communications to certain well-defined patterns (such as message-
passing).
Synchronization costs. As thread context switch on modern CPUs can cost up to 1 million
CPU cycles,[15] it makes writing efficient multithreading programs difficult. In particular,
special attention has to be paid to avoid inter-thread synchronization from being too
frequent.

Programming language support

Many programming languages support threading in some capacity.

IBM PL/I(F) included support for multithreading (called multitasking) as early as in the late
1960s, and this was continued in the Optimizing Compiler and later versions. The IBM
Enterprise PL/I compiler introduced a new model "thread" API. Neither version was part of
the PL/I standard.
Many implementations of C and C++ support threading, and provide access to the native
threading APIs of the operating system. A standardized interface for thread implementation
is POSIX Threads (Pthreads), which is a set of C-function library calls. OS vendors are free
to implement the interface as desired, but the application developer should be able to use
the same interface across multiple platforms. Most Unix platforms including Linux support
Pthreads. Microsoft Windows has its own set of thread functions in the process.h interface
for multithreading, like beginthread.
 Some higher level (and usually cross-platform) programming languages, such as Java,
Python, and .NET Framework languages, expose threading to developers while abstracting
the platform specific differences in threading implementations in the runtime. Several other
programming languages and language extensions also try to abstract the concept of
concurrency and threading from the developer fully (Cilk, OpenMP, Message Passing
Interface (MPI)). Some languages are designed for sequential parallelism instead
(especially using GPUs), without requiring concurrency or threads (Ateji PX, CUDA).
A few interpreted programming languages have implementations (e.g., Ruby MRI for Ruby,
CPython for Python) which support threading and concurrency but not parallel execution of
threads, due to a global interpreter lock (GIL). The GIL is a mutual exclusion lock held by the
interpreter that can prevent the interpreter from simultaneously interpreting the applications
code on two or more threads at once, which effectively limits the parallelism on multiple core
systems. This limits performance mostly for processor-bound threads, which require the
processor, and not much for I/O-bound or network-bound ones. Other implementations of
interpreted programming languages, such as Tcl using the Thread extension, avoid the GIL
limit by using an Apartment model where data and code must be explicitly "shared" between
threads. In Tcl each thread has one or more interpreters.
In programming models such as CUDA designed for data parallel computation, an array of
threads run the same code in parallel using only its ID to find its data in memory. In essence,
the application must be designed so that each thread performs the same operation on
different segments of memory so that they can operate in parallel and use the GPU
architecture.
Hardware description languages such as Verilog have a different threading model that
supports extremely large numbers of threads (for modeling hardware).

See also
Clone (Linux system call) Priority inversion
Communicating sequential processes Protothreads
Computer multitasking Simultaneous multithreading
Multi-core (computing) Thread pool pattern
Multithreading (computer hardware) Thread safety
Non-blocking algorithm Win32 Thread Information Block

References
1. Lamport, Leslie (September 1979). "How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly
Executes Multiprocess Programs" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/p
ubs/multi.pdf) (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Computers. C-28 (9): 690–691.
doi:10.1109/tc.1979.1675439 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2Ftc.1979.1675439).
S2CID 5679366 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:5679366).
2. Traffic Control in a Multiplexed Computer System (http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publicatio
ns/MIT-MAC-TR-030.ocr.pdf), Jerome Howard Saltzer, Doctor of Science thesis, 1966, see
footnote on page 20.
3. Herb Sutter. "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in
Software" (http://gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm).
4. "Erlang: 3.1 Processes" (http://www.erlang.org/doc/getting_started/conc_prog.html).
5. Sergey Ignatchenko. "Eight Ways to Handle Non-blocking Returns in Message-passing
Programs: from C++98 via C++11 to C++20" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lXUrvlMX
NU). CPPCON.
 6. Gagne, Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, Greg (2013). Operating system concepts
(9th ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. pp. 170–171. ISBN 9781118063330.
7. Marc Rittinghaus (23 December 2010). "System Call Aggregation for a Hybrid Thread
Model" (https://os.itec.kit.edu/downloads/sa_2010_rittinghaus-marc_syscall-aggregation.pd
f) (PDF). p. 10.
8. "User-Mode Scheduling" (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/ProcThread/us
er-mode-scheduling). Microsoft Docs. 30 May 2018.
9. "Multithreading in the Solaris Operating Environment" (https://web.archive.org/web/2009022
6174929/http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris9/multithread.pdf) (PDF). 2002.
Archived from the original (http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris9/multithread.pd
f) (PDF) on February 26, 2009.
10. Raúl Menéndez; Doug Lowe (2001). Murach's CICS for the COBOL Programmer (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=j1t1u_UniU0C&q=%22single+threading%22). Mike Murach &
Associates. p. 512. ISBN 978-1-890774-09-7.
11. Peter William O'Hearn; R. D. Tennent (1997). ALGOL-like languages (https://books.google.c
om/books?id=btp58ihqgccC&pg=PA157). 2. Birkhäuser Verlag. p. 157. ISBN 978-0-8176-
3937-2.
12. Sergey Ignatchenko. "Single-Threading: Back to the Future?" (http://accu.org/index.php/jour
nals/1634). Overload (97).
13. Edward Lee (January 10, 2006). "The Problem with Threads" (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/
Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.html). UC Berkeley.
14. "Multi-threading at Business-logic Level is Considered Harmful" (https://accu.org/journals/ov
erload/23/128/ignatchenko_2134/). ACCU.
15. 'No Bugs' Hare. "Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles" (http://ithare.com/infographics-oper
ation-costs-in-cpu-clock-cycles/).

Further reading
David R. Butenhof: Programming with POSIX Threads, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-
63392-2
Bradford Nichols, Dick Buttlar, Jacqueline Proulx Farell: Pthreads Programming, O'Reilly &
Associates, ISBN 1-56592-115-1
Paul Hyde: Java Thread Programming, Sams, ISBN 0-672-31585-8
Jim Beveridge, Robert Wiener: Multithreading Applications in Win32, Addison-Wesley,
ISBN 0-201-44234-5
Uresh Vahalia: Unix Internals: the New Frontiers, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-101908-2

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