Multi-Threaded Applications Programming (SI-260)

Who Can Benefit

Students who can benefit from this course are experienced C programmers who are proficient in system interface programming

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Prerequisites

To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to:

• Use basic Solaris commands
• Create and edit text files using emacs, vi, or the OpenWindows Text Editor
• Create correct C programs
• Demonstrate a general knowledge of UNIX system calls and library calls, including fork() and exec, signals, and interprocess communication
• Debug a C program using dbx or the OpenWindows debugger

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Skills Gained

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Define concurrency and give its advantages on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems
• Explain the role of the POSIX multithreading standard
• Decide which tasks lend themselves to a concurrent solution
• Explain the advantages of using threads over fork() to obtain concurrency
• Describe how application threads fit into the two-level scheduling model of Solaris 2x
• Compile and run programs using the user-level threads library
• Avoid synchronization pitfalls such as deadlock and recursive locking
• Use the multithread debugger on multithreaded programs
• Use thread specific data (TSD) correctly
• Explain the different scheduling algorithms for threads and how those algorithms affect programming choices
• Define synchronization-how it is implemented at the hardware level, what types of synchronization exist, and how to use them
• Explain how signals work, why UNIX has them, how they have been extended to work with threads, how you should program with signals, and how to create thread-specific timers and interrupts
• Explain operating system interactions, what aspects of the operating system affect your programming, how you deal with shared memory, unreserved virtual memory, CPU selection, CPU-specific binding of threads, kernel-level scheduling, etc.
• Use libraries correctly- understand what it means to be "MT-safe", how you deal with unsafe libraries, how you should write new libraries, and what the different efficiency issues are

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Related Courses

Before:

• UNIX System Interface Programming (SI-220B)

After:

• Solaris 9 Operating System Internals (SP-365)
• Writing Device Drivers for Solaris (SI-375)

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Course Content

Module 1 - Introduction to Multithreading

• Thread concepts, properties, and standards
• Concurrency versus parallelism
• Process structure
• Thread process structure
• Benefits of threads
• Distributed multiprocessing
• When not to use threads

Module 2 - Getting Started With POSIX Threads

• Thread creation and destruction
• Components of threads
• Attributes of threads
• Waiting for threads
• Using the Workshop debugger

Module 3 - Introduction to Synchronization

• The synchronization instruction
• POSIX synchronization variables
• Using mutexes, semaphores, readers/writer locks, and condition variables
• EINTR, spurious wakeups

Module 4 - Locking Problems

• Deadlocks
• Recursive Locking
• Race Conditions

Module 5 - Advanced Synchronization

• The lost wakeup problem
• Barriers, monitors, robust mutexes
• Dynamic allocation

Module 6 - Thread Specific Data

• Using TSD
• Deleting TSD keys
• TSD destructors

Module 7 - Cancellation

• State and type
• Cleanup handlers
• Cancellation and C++
• Bounded time termination

Module 8 - Design

• Master/slave
• Producer/consumer
• Pipeline

Module 9 - Thread-Safe Libraries

• Unsafe library functions
• pread() and pwrite()
• Window toolkits
• errno and getc()
• Stub functions

Module 10 - UNIX Signals

• How signals work
• Implementation details
• sigwait()
• Signal safety

Module 11 - Advanced Scheduling

• Realtime scheduling
• Priority inversion
• Allocation domains
• Scheduler Controls

Module 12 - Hardware

• SMP bus designs
• Cross-bar switches
• Sun Ultra Enterprise
• Out of order execution

Module 13 - Performance

• Amdahl's law
• Speedup for parallel benchmarks
• How many LWPs?
• Processor affinity

Module 14 - API Details

• Return values
• Constants
• Attribute objects
• Initialization and destruction

Module 15 - Compiling

• Solaris libraries
• Compiling POSIX
• Compiling mixed POSIX and UI

Module 16 - Other Tools

• Proctool
• Trace Normal Form

Module 17 - Other Details

• Fork problems
• Debugging interface
• Thread stacks
• Optional portions

Module 18 - More Information

• Newsgroups, FAQs, books, products

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