C++ Multithreading Cookbook PDF

Introduction

The central concept in all operating systems is the process or abstraction of an executing program. Most modern operating systems can do more than one operation at a time. For example, if the user is typing in a Word document, the computer can print the document, read from the hard disc drive buffer, play music, and so on. In multitasking operating systems, the central processing unit (from now on, CPU) makes a fast switch between programs, executing each program for only a few milliseconds.

While on a single processor system, strictly speaking, only one process can be executed by the processor in one unit of time—the operating system creates an impression that more than one process is running simultaneously by switching them extremely quickly. This is called pseudoparallelism in contrast to hardware-supported native parallelism in multiprocessor systems.

Multithreading is a very important concept for today's modern operating systems. It allows more than one thread of execution, which is very important for parallel tasks as well as for user-friendly application behavior.