Computer Science 330
Operating Systems

Fall 2025, Siena University

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In this lab, we will begin POSIX threads (pthreads) programming.

You must work individually on this lab.

Learning goal:

1. To learn the basics of pthreads programming.

Getting Set Up

In Canvas, you will find a link to follow to set up your GitHub repository, which will be named pthreads-lab-yourgitname, for this lab. Only one member of the group should follow the link to set up the repository on GitHub, then others should request a link to be granted write access.

You may choose to answer the lab questions in the README.md file in the top-level directory of your repository, or upload a document with your responses to your repository, or add a link to a shared document containing your responses to the README.md file.

pthreads Basics

The basic idea is that we can create and destroy threads of execution in a program, on the fly, during its execution. These threads can then be executed in parallel by the operating system scheduler. If we have multiple processors, we should be able to achieve a speedup over the single-threaded equivalent.

We start with a look at a pthreads "Hello, world" program, which is in the pthreadhello directory of your repository for this lab.

The most basic functionality involves the creation and destruction of threads:

• pthread_create(3THR) - This creates a new thread. It takes 4 arguments. The first is a pointer to a variable of type pthread_t. Upon return, this contains a thread identifier that may be used later in a call to pthread_join(). The second is a pointer to a pthread_attr_t structure that specifies thread creation attributes. In the pthreadhello program, we pass in NULL, which will request the system default attributes. The third argument is a pointer to a function that will be called when the thread is started. This function must take a single parameter of type void * and return void *. The fourth parameter is the pointer that will be passed as the argument to the thread function.
• pthread_exit(3THR) - This causes the calling thread to exit. This is called implicitly if the thread function called during the thread creation returns. Its argument is a return status value, which can be retrieved by pthread_join().
• pthread_join(3THR) - This causes the calling thread to block (wait) until the thread with the identifier passed as the first argument to pthread_join() has exited. The second argument is a pointer to a location where the return status passed to pthread_exit() can be stored. In the pthreadhello program, we pass in NULL, and hence ignore the value.

Prototypes for pthread functions are in pthread.h and programs need to link with libpthread.a (use -lpthread at link time).

Any global variables in your program are accessible to all threads. Local variables are directly accessible only to the thread in which they were created, though the memory can be shared by passing a pointer as part of the last argument to pthread_create().

A more interesting example is in proctree_threads.

This example builds a "tree" of threads to a depth given on the command line. It includes calls to pthread_self(), which returns the thread identifier of the calling thread.

Try it out and study the code to make sure you understand how it works.

You can see more about thread programming in OS zyBook Section 6.4, including Windows threads and Java threads. We will be using only pthreads this semester.

Submission

Commit and push!

Grading

This assignment will be graded out of 15 points.