Can a thread be pre-empted in the midst of a system call to kernel?

Question

I'm running 2 threads ( assume they are pthreads for the moment) . Thread_1() makes a user-defined API call which ultimately does some work in the kernel . Thread_2() is totally in user-space.

My question is : Can Thread_2() start executing by pre-empting Thread_1() while the API call is in progress , the control is somewhere inside the kernel ? If not , why , and if I want this scenario to occur ( for any reasons ) , what do I have to do ?

Answer 1

Calls to the kernel are considered to be either blocking or nonblocking. A blocking call (such as waiting for data to read from a network socket) can certainly be preempted with no action required on your part. Other threads will continue to run. Nonblocking kernel calls can be considered to be very fast and in practical terms it won't matter if you can actually preempt them or not.

Generally, when writing multithreaded code, you concentrate on how those threads interact with each other, and leave their interaction with the kernel up to the kernel to manage. It's designed to do a pretty good job.

Answer 2

That depends on the kernel. Classically kernels did not allow preemption (except at specific points when it would sleep a thread). But newer kernels have starting enabling preemption within the kernel itself.

Linux supports a preemptible kernel when it is built with CONFIG_PREEMPT. From the kernel documentation:

This option reduces the latency of the kernel by making all kernel code (that is not executing in a critical section) preemptible. This allows reaction to interactive events by permitting a low priority process to be preempted involuntarily even if it is in kernel mode executing a system call and would otherwise not be about to reach a natural preemption point. This allows applications to run more 'smoothly' even when the system is under load, at the cost of slightly lower throughput and a slight runtime overhead to kernel code.

Select this if you are building a kernel for a desktop or embedded system with latency requirements in the milliseconds range.

Answer 3

If you are asking whether a blocking kernel call like an fread() which requires disk IO can be pre-empted, then yes.

More specifically a blocking call will basically put Thread_1 to sleep while waiting for whatever it's waiting for. If Thread_1 is asleep then Thread_2 will be scheduled to run (unless there's something of higher priority waiting to run).

Edit: If you want a way to be "fairly confident" that Thread_1 is performing a blocking call, make Thread_2 lower priority than Thread_1 (so that it generally doesn't run unless Thread_1 is blocked) and when it runs, it elevates its priority to a higher level than Thread_1 until the hardware interrupt has been delivered, at which point it lowers its priority and calls sched_yield().