Module 61CSE218: Operating System
Threads
Vietnamese-German University
Ngoc Tran, Ph.D.
ngoc.th@vgu.edu.vn
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition
Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin and
Galvin, Gagne©2018
Gagne ©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.2 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Multithreaded Server Architecture
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.3 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 multiprocessor
architectures
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.4 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.5 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Concurrency vs. Parallelism
Concurrent execution on single-core system:
Parallelism on a multi-core system:
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.6 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Multicore Programming (Cont.)
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
As # of threads grows, so does architectural support for threading
CPUs have cores as well as hardware threads
1 core ~ 1 HW thread
1 core ~ 2 HW threads
Consider Oracle SPARC T4 with 8 cores, and 8 hardware threads
per core
Use hyperthreading technology: For each physical core, the OS
addresses two virtual/logical cores and shares the workload
between them when possible.
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.7 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Source: textbook “CPU Architecture Fundamentals”
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.8 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Single and Multithreaded Processes
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.9 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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
Solaris
Linux
Tru64 UNIX
Mac OS X
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.10 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Multithreading Models
Many-to-One
One-to-One
Many-to-Many
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.11 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.12 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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
Solaris 9 and later
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.13 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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
Solaris prior to version 9
Windows with the ThreadFiber
package
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.14 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Two-level Model
Similar to M:M, except that it also allows a user thread to
be bound to a kernel thread
Examples
IRIX
HP-UX
Tru64 UNIX
Solaris 8 and earlier
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.15 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.16 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 (Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X)
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.17 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Pthreads Example
- The C program demonstrates the basic Pthreads API for
constructing a multithreaded program that calculates the
summation of a non negative integer in a separate thread.
When this program begins, a single thread of
control begins in main()
C:\posixthread 10
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.18 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Pthreads Example (Cont.)
After some initialization,
main() creates a second thread
that begins control in the
runner() function. Both threads
share the global data sum.
In a Pthread begin execution in a specified
function. This is the runner() function.
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.19 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Pthreads Code for Joining 10 Threads
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.20 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Windows Multithreaded C Program
C:/Winthread 10
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.21 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Windows Multithreaded C Program (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.22 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Java Threads
Java threads are managed by the JVM
Typically implemented using the threads model provided by
underlying OS
Java threads may be created by:
Extending Thread class
Implementing the Runnable interface
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.23 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Java Multithreaded Program
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.24 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Java Multithreaded Program (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.25 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Multithread Exercise
1. Retype C code (pages 21,22) and Java code (pages 24,25) samples. Run
them.
2. Modify the exercise 1 for n threads with n inputted from the console.
Submit codes and screenshots of output of the 2 above exercises.
th Edition
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition 4.26 Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Implicit Threading
Growing in popularity as numbers of threads increase,
program correctness more difficult with explicit threads.
(difficulties with explicit threads are demonstrated on slide 5)
Creation and management of threads done by compilers and
run-time libraries rather than programmers.
Three methods explored
Thread Pools.
OpenMP.
Grand Central Dispatch.
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.27 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Thread Pools
Create a number of threads in a pool where they await work
Advantages:
Usually slightly faster to service a request with an existing
thread than create a new thread
Allows the number of threads in the application(s) to be
bound to the size of the pool
Separating task to be performed from mechanics of
creating task allows different strategies for running task
i.e.Tasks could be scheduled to run periodically
Windows API supports thread pools:
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.28 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP)
Set of compiler directives and an
API for C, C++, FORTRAN
Provides support for parallel
programming in shared-memory
environments
Identifies parallel regions –
blocks of code that can run in
parallel
#pragma omp parallel
Create as many threads as there are
cores
#pragma omp parallel for
for(i=0;i<N;i++) {
c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
}
Run for loop in parallel
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.30 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
Apple technology for Mac OS X and iOS operating systems
Extensions to C, C++ languages, API, and run-time library
Allows identification of parallel code sections
Manages most of the details of threading
Block is in “^{ }” - ˆ{ printf("I am a block"); }
Blocks placed in dispatch queue
Assigned to available thread in thread pool when removed
from queue
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.31 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Grand Central Dispatch
Two types of dispatch queues:
serial – blocks removed in FIFO order, queue is per process,
called main queue
Programmers can create additional serial queues within
program
concurrent – removed in FIFO order but several may be
removed at a time
Three system wide queues with priorities low, default, high
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.32 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.33 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Semantics of fork() and exec()
Does fork()duplicate only the calling thread or all
threads?
Some UNIXes have two versions of fork
exec() usually works as normal – replace the running
process including all threads
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.34 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Fork () and Exec()
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.35 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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
Signal is generated by particular event
Signal is delivered to a process
Once delivered, the signal must be handled.
Signal is handled by one of two signal handlers:
default
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.36 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.37 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.38 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Thread Cancellation
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.39 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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
th Edition
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition 4.40 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
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 – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.41 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Exercises
1. Write multithreaded programs using C++ or Java: 1 server and n clients.
Server and clients work as in the below transcript.
Server: provides the calculating service to clients.
Server loops to listen to the request from clients.
Once receiving a request from 1 client, server accepts it and creates
a thread for the client.
– Receives the two numbers x, y from the client.
– Computes x+y and returns the addition to the client.
– Close the connection with the client.
Client: connects to the server to use the calculating service.
Connects to the server.
Sends 2 numbers x, y to the server.
Receives the result and displays it on the console.
Close the connection to the server.
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.47 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
Exercises
2. Draw a sequence diagram to show the protocol of the communication
between server and client.
Operating System Concepts – 910 th Edition
th Edition 4.48 Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz,
Silberschatz,Galvin andGagne
Galvin, Gagne©2018
©2013
End of Chapter 4
Operating System Concepts – 9th10th Edition
Edition Lecturer: Ngoc Tran, Ph.D. Silberschatz, Galvin,
Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
Gagne ©2013
©2018
