Introduction to Concurrency and Threads

Thus far, you have seen the development of the basic abstractions that the OS performs. You have seen how to take a single physical CPU and turn it into multiple virtual CPUs, thus enabling the illusion of multiple programs running at the same time. You have also seen how to create the illusion of a large, private virtual memory for each process; this abstraction of the address space enables each program to behave as if it has its own memory when indeed the OS is secretly multiplexing address spaces across physical memory (and sometimes, disk).

More than one point of execution

In this note, you will now be introduced to a new abstraction for a single running process: that of ...