What about threads?

Posted Apr 23, 2004 21:54 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: What about threads? by stuart2048
Parent article: Scheduling domains

We're actually in a thread/process terminology crisis in Linux. Various people have various ideas about what we should mean by "thread," "process," "task," and "thread group."

It's bad right now because the thread/process model in Linux only recently changed, making what was once a pretty well agreed upon terminology less useful.

So the article is about Linux processes in the old terminology, the terminology you will still see in most of the comments in the Linux code. In that terminology, a "process" is in fact the most basic unit of scheduling known to the Linux kernel, and is what implements a thread in the POSIX thread model. It is alternatively called a "thread" and a "task."