Abstract
We describe a model for multiple threads of control within a single UNIX process. The main goals are to provide extremely lightweight threads and to rationalize and extend the UNIX Application Programming Interface for a multithreaded environment. The threads are intended to be sufficiently lightweight so that there can be thousands present and that synchronization and context switching can be accomplished rapidly without entering the kernel. These goals are achieved by providing lightweight user-level threads that are multiplexed on top of kernel-supported threads of control. This architecture allows the programmer to separate logical (program) concurrency from the required real concurrency, which is relatively costly, and to control both within a single programming model.
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© 1991 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Powell, M.L., Kleiman, S.R., Barton, S., Shan, D., Stein, D., Weeks, M. (1991). SunOS Multi-Thread Architecture. In: Catanzaro, B.J. (eds) The SPARC Technical Papers. Sun Technical Reference Library. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3192-9_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3192-9_24
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-97634-1
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