Chapter 4: Threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Chapter 4: Threads
 Overview
 Multicore Programming
 Multithreading Models

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and 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 – 9th Edition 4.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 multiprocessor
architectures

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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
 Consider Oracle SPARC T4 with 8 cores, and 8 hardware
threads per core

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Concurrency vs. Parallelism
 Concurrent execution on single-core system:

 Parallelism on a multi-core system:

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 Single and Multithreaded Processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9th Edition 4.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Amdahl’s Law
 It predicts the speedup possible given: P: the percentage of the total work
that is parallel (expressed as a decimal) and N: the number of ways we split
the work.

 The bottom of the fraction represents the percent of the original time we will
take - this equals the serial part plus one share of the parallel part. Dividing
1 by that gives us how many times faster we are working.
 Say 60% of a job can be made parallel and we use 2 processors.
Substituting .60 for P and 2 for N into the formula gives:

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 Amdahl’s Law
 We would see a speedup of 1.43 times. 40% of the work needs to be done
in serial. The other 60% is split into two equal parts, so instead of taking
60% of the time only takes 30%. So we can get the work done in 70% of the
original time, or 1.43x faster.
 Lets say we use 3 workers on the same job:

 40% of the work still must be done in serial. The 60% that is parallel will only
take 20% or the original total time. Thus, the work gets done in 60% of the
original time or a speedup of 1.67 times.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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

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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 muticore system because only one
may be in kernel at a time
 Few systems currently use this model
 Examples:
 Solaris Green Threads
 GNU Portable Threads

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 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

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 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

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 Two-level Model
 Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user thread to be
bound to kernel thread
 Examples
 IRIX
 HP-UX
 Tru64 UNIX
 Solaris 8 and earlier

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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)

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 Pthreads Example

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Pthreads
Pthreads Example (Cont.)Example (Cont.)

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 Pthreads Code for Joining 10 Threads

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

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 End of Chapter 4

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