COMP 3000 Essay 1 2010 Question 8

Question

What is the history of POSIX Threads (pthreads)? Consider - does this history explain why UNIX was so late to implement support for multithreaded processes?

Answer

Posix threads began in an era when multithreading started becoming a popular idea. UNIX traditionally had a system running only a single thread under a process. These processes could not share memory and interacted using 'pipes'. Once developers started wanting to be able to run multiple threads under one process, IEEE began to form together the POSIX standards. In 1988 POSIX.1 was ratified and was accepted as the international standard in 1990. From there the POSIX standards grew to more than 20 individual standards, encapsulating a large area of different groups.-afranco2

Hey guys, i'm just gunna get this started by posting a few links for everyone to get going. This will help explain a general idea of what they are and the history of them. Please add some more links or anything else you think would be helpful!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX_Threads https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/ http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/

-tmalone

I found this, might not help, but it might:--Rannath 02:09, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but most of what I am able to find has to do with information on things that fall under POSIX, not actually about POSIX-afranco2

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/os-research/part1/section-10.html

Might be of some use as well --Lmundt 14:48, 7 October 2010 (UTC) https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/