Dictionary of Thread Terms
| Base Address Control | An eccentricity of Solaris which allows identification of where the thread will reside in physical memory. |
| Call-Once Functions | An ability to limit execution of a particular function/routine only once. Subsequent calls will return without execution and error. |
| Cancellation | Killing threads from within program. |
| Condition Variables | |
| Detached Threads | |
| Fork All Threads | A flag which forces all thread-creation calls to be forks with shared memory. Since Linux defines a fork() as a specific kind of clone() (thread), this is somewhat inherent. Other implementations have to redefine or encapsulate thread-creation calls in order to accomplish this. |
| Fork Calling Thread Only | |
| Forked Process | A stand-alone task that shares nothing intrinsicly with other tasks. The only communication is has is through pipes, files and explicitly shared memory. |
| Joinable Threads | The ability to merge threads into a single execution context(?). |
| Kernel-space Threads | Threads that are handled/scheduled by the kernel. |
| Mutex | Stands for Mutual Exclusion. A mutex can lock specific sections of memory using access flags. |
| Mutex Attributes | |
| Per-thread Data Handling Function | |
| Per-thread Signal Handling | Ability to specify sharing signals. In other words, several threads can share a signal: if the signal is raised only one thread has to respond. This is different from unshared signals: each thread has its own signal table. |
| Priority Inversion Handling | As threads get I/O blocked, provide a temporary reprioritization of threads. |
| Priority Scheduling | Programmatically identifying the order, priority, or next threads to execute. |
| Process | Essentially the same as a Task, having it's own private data and event regions. However, often "process" defines the whole running program which may have several threads and/or tasks. Also, "process" describes a supervising program. |
| Processor-specific Thread Allocation | The ability to designate a specific thread to a specific processor. This is useful for processors that handle special things like interrupts or excelerators. |
| Readers/Writer Locking | In Solaris, threads can have one writer and several readers at the same time. |
| Semaphores | A pair of functions that lock datasets, p() and v() (lock and unlock, respectively) |
| Shared/Private Mutexes | Having separate spaces for mutexes |
| Specifying Concurrency | The ability to identify which threads will be multiprocessed. |
| Stack Size Control | The ability to limit, resize or check the thread's stack usage. |
| Synchronization | |
| Task | Like the Process, a Task has its own data and event regions, but a task often includes interaction with other parent, child or sister tasks. The task may have specific assignments to perform; whereas, the process may supervise. |
| Thread | The smallest context of execution (COE). Often it is created to share data directly with the parent. |
| Thread | As how Linux Torvalds defines it: a "context of execution". It basically is the minimum basic executable unit that contains shared code, data and stack. Thus it is simply a processor's context. |
| Thread Attributes | |
| Thread ID Comparison | |
| Thread Suspension | Temporarily halting execution of a thread. In Linux kernel-space threads, this can be accomplished using SIGSTOP and SIGCONT. |
| User-space Threads | Threads that are handled/scheduled within a single task by special libraries. |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
![[Left Arrow]](ArrowLeft.gif){kind=small}
![[Home]](House.gif){kind=small}
![[Book Search]](BookSearch.gif){kind=small}
![[Mailbox]](MailBox.gif){kind=small}
![[Right Arrow]](ArrowRight.gif){kind=small}