CST 334 - Operating Systems - Week 5

 

This week in CST 334, we learned about the concept of concurrency, focusing on threads and their management. Concurrency allows multiple computations to execute simultaneously, which is essential for maximizing CPU utilization and improving the performance of multi-processor systems. I learned that threads are lightweight processes that share the same address space but have their own program counter, registers, and stack. This sharing facilitates easier data exchange between threads compared to separate processes. We also learned about the structure and function of Thread Control Blocks (TCBs), which store the state of a thread during context switching, and understood the significance of thread stacks in maintaining local variables and function parameters.

Part of our learning was understanding the challenges associated with concurrency, such as race conditions, where multiple threads access and modify shared data unpredictably. This can lead to inconsistent or incorrect outcomes. To mitigate these issues, we studied critical sections and mutual exclusion, which ensure that only one thread can execute a critical section at a time. We also learned about synchronization primitives like atomic operations and locks, which enforce mutual exclusion. The usage of condition variables for managing complex synchronization scenarios, such as the producer consumer problem, and ensuring proper coordination between threads. This week's lessons emphasized the importance of careful thread management and synchronization to prevent concurrency issues and ensure efficient and correct execution of concurrent programs.