Worker Factories (Thread Pools)

Worker factories refer to the internal mechanism used to implement user-mode thread pools. The legacy thread pool routines were completely implemented in user mode inside the Ntdll.dll library, and the Windows API provided various routines to call into the relevant routines, which provided waitable timers, wait callbacks, and automatic thread creation and deletion, depending on the amount of work being done.

Because the kernel can have direct control over thread scheduling, creation, and termination without the typical costs associated with doing these operations from user mode, most of the functionality required to support the user-mode thread pool implementation in Windows is now located in the kernel instead, ...

Get Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.