Chapter 4: Threads &

Concurrency

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
 Designing 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

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 Multithreaded Server Architecture

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 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 4.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multicore Programming
 Multicore or multiprocessor systems puts 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 4.8 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 4.9 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 4.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Data and Task Parallelism

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Amdahl’s Law
 Identifies performance gains from adding additional cores to an
application that has both serial and parallel components
 S is serial portion
 N processing cores

 That is, if application is 75% parallel / 25% serial, moving from 1 to 2

cores results in speedup of 1.6 times
 As N approaches infinity, speedup approaches 1 / S

Serial portion of an application has disproportionate effect on

performance gained by adding additional cores

 But does the law take into account contemporary multicore systems?

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Amdahl’s Law

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.13 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

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 User and Kernel Threads

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 Multithreading Models
 Many-to-One
 One-to-One
 Many-to-Many

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 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:
• Solaris Green Threads
• GNU Portable Threads

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.17 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 4.18 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

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 Two-level Model
 Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user thread to be bound to
kernel thread

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 Thread Libraries
 Thread library provides programmer with API for creating and
managing threads
 Two primary ways of implementing
• Library entirely in user space
• Kernel-level library supported by the OS

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pthreads
 May be provided either as user-level or kernel-level
 A POSIX standard (IEEE 1003.1c) API for thread creation and
synchronization
 Specification, not implementation
 API specifies behavior of the thread library, implementation is up to
development of the library
 Common in UNIX operating systems (Linux & Mac OS X)

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 Pthreads Example

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 Pthreads Example (Cont.)

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 Pthreads Code for Joining 10 Threads

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 4. 21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Threading Issues
 Semantics of fork() and exec() system calls
 Signal handling
• Synchronous and asynchronous
 Thread cancellation of target thread
• Asynchronous or deferred
 Thread-local storage
 Scheduler Activations

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Signal Handling
 Signals are used in UNIX systems to notify a process that a particular
event has occurred.
 A signal handler is used to process signals
1. Signal is generated by particular event
2. Signal is delivered to a process
3. Signal is handled by one of two signal handlers:
1. default
2. user-defined
 Every signal has default handler that kernel runs when handling
signal
• User-defined signal handler can override default
• For single-threaded, signal delivered to process

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Signal Handling (Cont.)
 Where should a signal be delivered for multi-threaded?
• Deliver the signal to the thread to which the signal applies
• Deliver the signal to every thread in the process
• Deliver the signal to certain threads in the process
• Assign a specific thread to receive all signals for the process

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Thread Cancellation
 Terminating a thread before it has finished
 Thread to be canceled is target thread
 Two general approaches:
• Asynchronous cancellation terminates the target thread
immediately
• Deferred cancellation allows the target thread to periodically
check if it should be cancelled
 Pthread code to create and cancel a thread:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Thread Cancellation (Cont.)
 Invoking thread cancellation requests cancellation, but actual
cancellation depends on thread state

 If thread has cancellation disabled, cancellation remains pending until

thread enables it
 Default type is deferred
• Cancellation only occurs when thread reaches cancellation point
 i.e., pthread_testcancel()
 Then cleanup handler is invoked
 On Linux systems, thread cancellation is handled through signals

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Thread-Local Storage

 Thread-local storage (TLS) allows each thread to have its own copy
of data
 Useful when you do not have control over the thread creation process
(i.e., when using a thread pool)
 Different from local variables
• Local variables visible only during single function invocation
• TLS visible across function invocations
 Similar to static data
• TLS is unique to each thread

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Scheduler Activations
 Both M:M and Two-level models require
communication to maintain the appropriate
number of kernel threads allocated to the
application
 Typically use an intermediate data structure
between user and kernel threads – lightweight
process (LWP)
• Appears to be a virtual processor on which
process can schedule user thread to run
• Each LWP attached to kernel thread
• How many LWPs to create?
 Scheduler activations provide upcalls - a
communication mechanism from the kernel to
the upcall handler in the thread library
 This communication allows an application to
maintain the correct number kernel threads

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Linux Threads
 Linux refers to them as tasks rather than threads
 Thread creation is done through clone() system call
 clone() allows a child task to share the address space of the
parent task (process)
• Flags control behavior

 struct task_struct points to process data structures (shared or

unique)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 4

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