Windows Internals, Part 1: System architecture, processes, threads, memory management, and more, Seventh Edition

Chapter 4. Threads

This chapter explains the data structures and algorithms that deal with threads and thread scheduling in Windows. The first section shows how to create threads. Then the internals of threads and thread scheduling are described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of thread pools.

Creating threads

Before discussing the internal structures used to manage threads, let’s take a look at creating threads from an API perspective to give a sense of the steps and arguments involved.

The simplest creation function in user mode is CreateThread. This function creates a thread in the current process, accepting the following arguments:

An optional security attributes structure This specifies the security descriptor to attach to the ...