Threads

[Stephen Young_1]

Hi,

Can anyone give me a brief explanation of what Threads are and how they work ?

Cheers

Steve

[Steven Gillard_2]

I won't try to put it into my own words, I'd probably just confuse you, and myself :)

Instead, take a look at /usr/share/doc/proc_mgt.txt. This is a detailed document but the section titled "What are Kernel Threads" has a good basic definition.

Regards,
Steve

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Stephan,

The main difference between a process and a thread is that thread will have only those properties for it's flow control independent of it's parent. While the process will have all the regular process properties such as pid, gid,uid, common address space etc., This is why threads are often called lightweight processes.

User threads can be programmed to handle multiple flow controls within a program while a kernel thread can be referenced by any other thread in the system.

-Sri

[Santosh Nair_1]

You can think of a thread as a child process which shares the environment of the parent process, i.e. doesn't have its own data/stack space, etc. The advantages of threads over child processes are that there is little overhead for spawning a thread and therefore a thread tends to be faster (at least at initialization) than spawning a child process.

Hope this helps a bit (?)

-Santosh

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi,

http://www.serpentine.com/~bos/threads-faq/#3-What-are-threads-

http://dis.cs.umass.edu/~wagner/threads_html/sect1.html

(I must get rid of the habit of posting here the first two results that Google returns when I search for the subject of a note and instead just write: Use Google. It's surfer-friendly.)

E.