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Operating Systems: Virtualization, Concurrency & Persistence

Thread Creation

Explore the process of creating threads using the POSIX Thread API. Understand how to initialize threads with pthread_create, use function pointers for thread routines, and pass arguments efficiently to build multi-threaded programs.

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The first thing you have to be able to do to write a multi-threaded program is to create new threads, and thus some kind of thread creation interface must exist. In POSIX, it is easy:

C
#include <pthread.h>
int
pthread_create(pthread_t      *thread,
         const pthread_attr_t *attr,
               void           *(*start_routine)(void*),
               void           *arg);

Explanation

This declaration might look a little complex (particularly if you haven’t used function pointers in C), but actually it’s not too bad. There are four arguments:

  • thread
  • attr
  • start_routine
  • arg

The first, thread, is a pointer to a structure of type pthread_t ...