Multithreading Structure

Traditional UNIX already supports the concept of threads. Each process contains a single thread, so programming with multiple processes is programming with multiple threads. But, a process is also an address space, and creating a process involves creating a new address space.

Creating a thread is less expensive than creating a new process because the newly created thread uses the current process address space. The time that is required to switch between threads is less than the time required to switch between processes. A switch between threads is faster because no switching between address spaces occurs.

Communication between the threads of one process is simple because the threads share everything, most importantly address space. So, data produced by one thread is immediately available to all the other threads in the process.

However, this sharing of data leads to a different set of challenges for the programmer. Care must be taken to synchronize threads to protect data from being modified by more than one thread at once, or from being read by some threads while being modified by another thread at the same time. See Thread Synchronization for more information.

User-Level Threads

Threads are the primary programming interface in multithreaded programming. Threads are visible only from within the process, where the threads share all process resources like address space, open files, and so on.

User-Level Threads State

The following state is unique to each thread.

• Thread ID

• Register state, including program counter (PC) and stack pointer

• Stack

• Signal mask

• Priority

• Thread-private storage

Threads share the process instructions and most of the process data. For that reason, a change in shared data by one thread can be seen by the other threads in the process. When a thread needs to interact with other threads in the same process, the thread can do so without involving the operating environment.

User-level threads are so named to distinguish them from kernel-level threads, which are the concern of systems programmers only. Because this book is for application programmers, kernel-level threads are not discussed.