Back to Week 6 Concurrency and Locks
Lecture 08 on "Introduction to Concurrency" in our 377 Operating Systems series delves into the complex yet fascinating world of concurrent computing within operating systems. We'll start by exploring how a single physical CPU can be virtualized to support the execution of multiple programs simultaneously, laying the foundation for understanding the pivotal role of operating system abstractions. A significant part of our discussion will revolve around threads—an abstraction similar to processes but with unique characteristics, such as shared address spaces and individual sets of registers, necessitating nuanced context-switching mechanisms. We'll examine why threads are preferred for tasks requiring parallelism or non-blocking I/O operations and compare their use with processes for data-sharing versus logically separate tasks. The lecture will also address critical challenges in concurrency, including uncontrolled scheduling and race conditions, and introduce synchronization primitives and atomicity as solutions. By understanding these concepts, you'll gain insights into how modern operating systems manage to perform efficiently and reliably in multi-threaded environments, preparing you for both theoretical and practical applications in computing systems.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GMa1QtQZllWEVEK19Bzw4XqgDz2Ne7qW0rEu2kzdkio/edit?usp=sharing
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