Chapter Four -- Threads -- Lecture Ideas

• What resources does a process need?
  
  
• What individual resources does a thread need? (some individual id info including a "thread ID number," program counter, registers, runtime stack) Every other resource must be shared with the other threads in the process. (code, data, open files, and so forth)
  
  
• Discuss (so-called) benefits of multi-threading:
  
  
  • Responsiveness: A multi-threaded task may have better turnaround time -- elapsed time from submission to finish of task. This is because a single process can use CPU(s) *and* I/O channel(s) simultaneously. However the scheduling policy of the OS can work against this potential advantage.
    
    
  • Resource Sharing: The sharing of primary memory facilitates the communication of the threads of a task. The overall system benefits from the sharing of primary memory because more memory is available to run more programs. This can be viewed as something of a potential disadvantage to the individual task because it must share the CPU(s) with more tasks. Sharing of memory mapping information can make context switching go faster, but only when switching between threads of one task, not when switching from task to task. Therefore the scheduler has to do some special handling to get the benefit of fast context switching -- i.e. "batching" the threads of one task.
    
    
  • Economy: It is more economical to create a new thread in a task than to create a new task. It is more economical to switch from one thread to another within the same task than to switch between different tasks.
    
    
  • Utilization of Multiprocessing: Multithreading allows the process to use more than one CPU simultaneously (assuming helpful scheduling).
    
    
• User-level threads rely on library functions.
  
  
• User-level threads are generally faster to create and manage than kernel-level threads.
  
  
• Unlike the case with kernel-level threads, the entire task generally has to block when a user-level thread does a blocking system call.
  
  
• A group of user threads supported by only one kernel thread can only use one CPU.
  
  
• Question: Can it be made feasible to run tasks with relatively large numbers of I/O-bound user-level threads?
  
  
• Discuss multithreading support models -- how user threads are supported by kernel threads: many-to-one model, one-to-one model, and many-to-many model.
  
  
• How should fork-task and exec-task behave when called by a thread in a task?
  
  
• What are (Unix) signals? What is the relation to interrupts and traps? If a process is "killed by a signal" after attempting an illegal memory access what is the chain of events? Is a trap involved? Is the OS involved?
  
  
• When a signal is sent to a multithreaded application, which thread should receive the signal and handle it? System designers have to make some decisions on how to answer this according to the type of signal sent. For example a signal to kill the process should probably go to all the threads. A "suspend" or "continue" signal might be intended for one particular thread.
  
  
• Discuss thread pools
  
  
• Look at example of pthread code.
  
  
• Discuss Solaris 2 Threads
  
  
• Discuss Linux "Threads"