MIT 6.S081 Lab thread

Compulsory exercises

Preparation

• reading
  
  To start the lab, switch to the thread branch:

git fetch
git checkout thread
make clean

Uthread: switching between threads (moderate)

Using threads (moderate)

Barrier(moderate)

Optional challenge exercises

The user-level thread package interacts badly with the operating system in several ways. For example, if one user-level thread blocks in a system call, another user-level thread won’t run, because the user-level threads scheduler doesn’t know that one of its threads has been descheduled by the xv6 scheduler. As another example, two user-level threads will not run concurrently on different cores, because the xv6 scheduler isn’t aware that there are multiple threads that could run in parallel. Note that if two user-level threads were to run truly in parallel, this implementation won’t work because of several races (e.g., two threads on different processors could call thread_schedule concurrently, select the same runnable thread, and both run it on different processors.)

There are several ways of addressing these problems. One is using scheduler activations and another is to use one kernel thread per user-level thread (as Linux kernels do). Implement one of these ways in xv6. This is not easy to get right; for example, you will need to implement TLB shootdown when updating a page table for a multithreaded user process.

Add locks, condition variables, barriers, etc. to your thread package.