Content from 2016-02

Chapter four discusses detaching and joining threads, passing the return value to the parent, and dynamic initialization of data used concurrently by groups of threads.

In part three, we deal with synchronizing access to shared resources. As you know, bad things happen when multiple threads write to the same memory. We will implement basic mutexes using atomic operations on memory and futex syscalls for sleep management.

Typically, all the tutorials on building and debugging software for the Tiva microcontroller use Windows and clickable GUI IDEs. We can achieve the same with open source tools and eliminate all the useless fluff.

In the second chapter of the threading saga, we need to find a way to store and retrieve the pointer to the current thread by calling a function. It will be necessary for various internals and the thread-local storage. We can keep it in the Segment Register typically not used in x86_64 long mode but still taken care of during the context switch.