Chapter 12. POSIX Threads

One method of achieving parallelism is for multiple processes to cooperate and synchronize through shared memory or message passing. An alternative approach uses multiple threads of execution in a single address space. This chapter explains how threads are created, managed and used to solve simple problems. The chapter then presents an overview of basic thread management under the POSIX standard. The chapter discusses different thread models and explains how these models are accommodated under the standard.

Objectives

• Learn basic thread concepts

• Experiment with POSIX thread calls

• Explore threaded application design

• Use threads in unsynchronized applications

• Understand thread-safety and error handling