Non-preemptive Pthreads?

Question

Is there a way to use pthreads without a scheduler, so context switch occurs only if a thread explicitly yields, or is blocked on a mutex/cond? If not, is there a way to minimize the scheduling overhead, so that forced context switches will occur as rarely as possible?

The question refers to the Linux gcc/g++ implementation of POSIX threads.

Answer 1

You can use Pth (a.k.a. GNU Portable Threads), a non-preemptive thread library. Configuring it with --enable-pthread will create a plug-in replacement for pthreads. I just built and tested this on my Mac and it works fine for a simple pthreads program.

From the README:

Pth is a very portable POSIX/ANSI-C based library for Unix platforms which provides non-preemptive priority-based scheduling for multiple threads of execution (aka `multithreading') inside event-driven applications. All threads run in the same address space of the server application, but each thread has its own individual program-counter, run-time stack, signal mask and errno variable.

The thread scheduling itself is done in a cooperative way, i.e., the threads are managed by a priority- and event-based non-preemptive scheduler. The intention is, that this way one can achieve better portability and run-time performance than with preemptive scheduling. The event facility allows threads to wait until various types of events occur, including pending I/O on filedescriptors, asynchronous signals, elapsed timers, pending I/O on message ports, thread and process termination, and even customized callback functions.

Additionally Pth provides an optional emulation API for POSIX.1c threads (`Pthreads') which can be used for backward compatibility to existing multithreaded applications.