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Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew S. Tanenb...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf
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Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Modern Operating Systems by Herbert...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Page 133
102
PROCESSES AND THREADS
CHAP. 2
reply processed. With nonblocking disk I/O, a reply probably will have to take the
form of a signal or interrupt.
In this design, the ‘‘sequential process’’ model that we had in the first two
cases is lost. The state of the computation must be explicitly saved and restored in
the table every time the server switches from working on one request to another.
In
effect, we are simulating the threads and their stacks the hard way.
A design like
this, in which each computation has a saved state, and there exists some set of
events that can occur to change the state, is called a
finite-state machine
. This
concept is widely used throughout computer science.
It should now be clear what threads have to offer. They make it possible to
retain the idea of sequential processes that make blocking calls (e.g., for disk I/O)
and still achieve parallelism. Blocking system calls make programming easier, and
parallelism improves performance. The single-threaded server retains the simpli-
city of blocking system calls but gives up performance. The third approach
achieves high performance through parallelism but uses nonblocking calls and in-
terrupts and thus is hard to program. These models are summarized in Fig. 2-10.
Model
Characteristics
Threads
Parallelism, blocking system calls
Single-threaded process
No parallelism, blocking system calls
Finite-state machine
Parallelism, nonblocking system calls, interrupts
Figure 2-10.
Three ways to construct a server.
A third example where threads are useful is in applications that must process
very large amounts of data. The normal approach is to read in a block of data,
process it, and then write it out again. The problem here is that if only blocking
system calls are available, the process blocks while data are coming in and data are
going out. Having the CPU go idle when there is lots of computing to do is clearly
wasteful and should be avoided if possible.
Threads offer a solution. The process could be structured with an input thread,
a processing thread, and an output thread. The input thread reads data into an input
buffer.
The processing thread takes data out of the input buffer, processes them,
and puts the results in an output buffer. The output buffer writes these results back
to disk.
In this way, input, output, and processing can all be going on at the same
time. Of course, this model works only if a system call blocks only the calling
thread, not the entire process.
2.2.2 The Classical Thread Model
Now that we have seen why threads might be useful and how they can be used,
let us investigate the idea a bit more closely. The process model is based on two in-
dependent concepts: resource grouping and execution. Sometimes it is useful to
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