Chapter 4: Multithreaded

Programming

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Chapter 4: Multithreaded Programming
 Overview
 Multicore Programming
 Multithreading Models
 Thread Libraries
 Implicit Threading
 Threading Issues
 Operating System Examples

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Objectives
 To introduce the notion of a thread—a fundamental unit of CPU utilization that forms the basis of
multithreaded computer systems

 To discuss the APIs for the Pthreads, Windows, and Java thread libraries

 To explore several strategies that provide implicit threading

 To examine issues related to multithreaded programming

 To cover operating system support for threads in Windows and Linux

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.3 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 4.4 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 4.6 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
 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:

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

 I.e. 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
 User Threads and Kernel Threads
 User threads - management done by user-level threads library
 Three primary thread libraries:
 POSIX Pthreads
 Win32 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 – 9th Edition 4.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multithreading Models
 Many-to-One

 One-to-One

 Many-to-Many

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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 NT/XP/2000
 Linux
 Solaris 9 and later

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 NT/2000 with the ThreadFiber package

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 4.16 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 4.17 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)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Pthreads Example

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Pthreads Example (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Pthreads Code for Joining 10 Threads

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 Win32 API Multithreaded C Program

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 Win32 API Multithreaded C Program (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Multithreaded Program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Multithreaded Program (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Implicit Threading
 Growing in popularity as numbers of threads increase, program correctness more difficult with explicit
threads
 Creation and management of threads done by compilers and run-time libraries rather than programmers

 Three methods explored

 Thread Pools
 OpenMP
 Grand Central Dispatch

 Other methods include Microsoft Threading Building Blocks (TBB), java.util.concurrent package

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9th Edition 4.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Grand Central Dispatch
 Apple technology for Mac OS X and iOS operating systems
 Extensions to C, C++ languages, API, and run-time library
 Allows identification of parallel 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
 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 – 9th Edition 4.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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

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

 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 – 9th Edition 4.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9th Edition 4.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©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 – 9th Edition 4.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Operating System Examples
 Windows XP Threads

 Linux Thread

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 Windows Threads
 Windows implements the Windows API – primary API for Win 98, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP, and Win 7

 Implements the one-to-one mapping, kernel-level

 Each thread contains

 A thread id
 Register set representing state of processor
 Separate user and kernel stacks for when thread runs in user mode or kernel mode
 Private data storage area used by run-time libraries and dynamic link libraries (DLLs)

 The register set, stacks, and private storage area are known as the context of the thread

 The primary data structures of a thread include:

 ETHREAD (executive thread block) – includes pointer to process to which thread belongs and to
KTHREAD, in kernel space
 KTHREAD (kernel thread block) – scheduling and synchronization info, kernel-mode stack, pointer
to TEB, in kernel space
 TEB (thread environment block) – thread id, user-mode stack, thread-local storage, in user space

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Windows XP Threads Data Structures

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 – 9th Edition 4.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013