Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

4.11. Multi-threaded process implementation

In the discussion in Section 4.10 we saw that a number of processes might execute in a single module of the operating system. In the following sections we shall see a number of processes executing a concurrent program at user level.

These are commonly called user threads when we are discussing implementation. The user threads share the address space of the application and all the resources allocated to the application by the operating system at runtime, such as memory and open files. We have two separate concepts here:

• the unit of execution (the unit of scheduling by the operating system);

• the unit of ...