Thread Execution

As we explained in the previous chapter, concurrency can be implemented using only one of the multithreading or multi-processing approaches within a POSIX-compliant system. Since these two approaches are such large topics to discuss, they've been split into four separate chapters in order to give each topic the coverage that it needs:

• The multithreading approach will be discussed in both this chapter and Chapter 16, Thread Synchronization
• The multi-processing approach will be covered in Chapter 17, Process Execution, and Chapter 18, Process Synchronization.

In this chapter, we're going to look at the anatomy of a thread and the APIs that can be used to create and manage threads. In the next chapter, Chapter 16, Thread Synchronization, we will go through the concurrency control mechanisms in a multithreaded environment to study how they are supposed to resolve concurrency-related issues.

Multi-processing is all about the idea of...