The Role of Threads

What are threads?

We will now look at another important fundamental concept of Linux core dump analysis: a thread or a lightweight process (LWP). A thread is a unit of execution, and there can be many threads, LWPs, for a given process (all of them share the same process space).

Every thread executes some code and performs various tasks. Every thread has its ID (LWP ID). In this course, we’ll also learn how to navigate between process threads.

Note: The threads transition to kernel space via the libc dynamic library, similar to ntdll in Windows and libsystem_kernel in Mac OS X. Threads that are additional to the main thread (POSIX Threads) originate from the libc and libpthread dynamic libraries, which are similar to libsystem_c in Mac OS X.