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Thread Identifier
Thread Control Block (TCB) is a data structure in an operating system kernel that contains thread-specific information needed to manage the thread. The TCB is "the manifestation of a thread in an operating system." Each thread has a thread control block. An operating system keeps track of the thread control blocks in kernel memory. An example of information contained within a TCB is: * Thread Identifier: Unique id (tid) is assigned to every new thread * Stack pointer: Points to thread's stack in the process * Program counter: Points to the current program instruction of the thread * State of the thread (running, ready, waiting, start, done) * Thread's register values * Pointer to the Process control block (PCB) of the process that the thread lives on The Thread Control Block acts as a library of information about the threads in a system. Specific information is stored in the thread control block highlighting important information about each process. See also * Parallel Thre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Structure
In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for Efficiency, efficient Data access, access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the Function (computer programming), functions or Operator (computer programming), operations that can be applied to the data, i.e., it is an algebraic structure about data. Usage Data structures serve as the basis for abstract data types (ADT). The ADT defines the logical form of the data type. The data structure implements the physical form of the data type. Different types of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks. For example, Relational database, relational databases commonly use B-tree indexes for data retrieval, while compiler Implementation, implementations usually use hash tables to look up Identifier (computer languages), identifiers. Data s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating System Kernel
A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources (e.g. I/O, memory, cryptography) via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the use of common resources, such as CPU, cache, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit. The critical code of the kernel is usually ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thread (computing)
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. In many cases, a thread is a component of a process. The multiple threads of a given process may be executed concurrently (via multithreading capabilities), sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non- thread-local global variables at any given time. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems. History Threads made an early appearance under the name of "tasks" in IBM's batch processing operating system, OS/360, in 1967. It provided users with three available configurations of the OS/360 control system, of which Multiprogramming with a Variable Number of Tasks (MVT) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stack Pointer
A stack register is a computer central processor register whose purpose is to keep track of a call stack. On an accumulator-based architecture machine, this may be a dedicated register. On a machine with multiple general-purpose registers, it may be a register that is reserved by convention, such as on the IBM System/360 through z/Architecture architecture and RISC architectures, or it may be a register that procedure call and return instructions are hardwired to use, such as on the PDP-11, VAX, and Intel x86 architectures. Some designs such as the Data General Eclipse had no dedicated register, but used a reserved hardware memory address for this function. Machines before the late 1960s—such as the PDP-8 and HP 2100—did not have compilers which supported recursion. Their subroutine instructions typically would save the current location in the jump address, and then set the program counter to the ''next'' address. While this is simpler than maintaining a stack, sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Program Counter
The program counter (PC), commonly called the instruction pointer (IP) in Intel x86 and Itanium microprocessors, and sometimes called the instruction address register (IAR), the instruction counter, or just part of the instruction sequencer, is a processor register that indicates where a computer is in its program sequence. Usually, the PC is incremented after fetching an instruction, and holds the memory address of (" points to") the next instruction that would be executed. Processors usually fetch instructions sequentially from memory, but ''control transfer'' instructions change the sequence by placing a new value in the PC. These include branches (sometimes called jumps), subroutine calls, and returns. A transfer that is conditional on the truth of some assertion lets the computer follow a different sequence under different conditions. A branch provides that the next instruction is fetched from elsewhere in memory. A subroutine call not only branches but saves the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Processor Register
A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-only. In computer architecture, registers are typically addressed by mechanisms other than main memory, but may in some cases be assigned a memory address e.g. DEC PDP-10, ICT 1900. Almost all computers, whether load/store architecture or not, load items of data from a larger memory into registers where they are used for arithmetic operations, bitwise operations, and other operations, and are manipulated or tested by machine instructions. Manipulated items are then often stored back to main memory, either by the same instruction or by a subsequent one. Modern processors use either static or dynamic random-access memory (RAM) as main memory, with the latter usually accessed via one or more cache levels. Processor registers are normal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Process Control Block
A process control block (PCB), also sometimes called a process descriptor, is a data structure used by a computer operating system to store all the information about a process. When a process is created (initialized or installed), the operating system creates a corresponding process control block, which specifies and tracks the process state (i.e. new, ready, running, waiting or terminated). Since it is used to track process information, the PCB plays a key role in context switching. An operating system kernel stores PCBs in a process table. The current working directory of a process is one of the properties that the kernel stores in the process's PCB. Role The role of the PCBs is central in process management: they are accessed and/or modified by most utilities, particularly those involved with scheduling and resource management. Structure In multitasking operating systems, the PCB stores data needed for correct and efficient process management. Though the details of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Thread Execution
Parallel Thread Execution (PTX or NVPTX) is a low-level parallel thread execution virtual machine and instruction set architecture used in Nvidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming environment. The Nvidia CUDA Compiler (NVCC) translates code written in CUDA, a C++-like language, into PTX instructions (an IL), and the graphics driver contains a compiler which translates PTX instructions into executable binary code, which can run on the processing cores of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). The GNU Compiler Collection and LLVM also have the ability to generate PTX. Inline PTX assembly can be used in CUDA. Registers PTX uses an arbitrarily large processor register A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-onl ... set; the output from the compiler is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thread Environment Block
The Thread Information Block (TIB) or Thread Environment Block (TEB) is a data structure in Win32 on x86 that stores information about the currently running thread. It descended from, and is backward-compatible on 32-bit systems with, a similar structure in OS/2. The TIB is officially undocumented for Windows 9x. The Windows NT series DDK (as well as the MinGW/ReactOS implementation) includes a struct NT_TIB in winnt.h that documents the subsystem independent part. Even before TIB was effectively documented, many applications have already started using its fields that they are effectively a part of the API. The first field containing the SEH frame, in particular, is directly referenced by the code produced by Microsoft's own compiler. The Win32 subsystem-specific part of the TEB is undocumented, but Wine includes a TEB definition in winternl.h. The TIB can be used to get a lot of information on the process without calling Win32 API. Examples include emulating GetLastError(), Ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
