A few examples

Let's take a look at some examples. We'll assume that the proper include files (<pthread.h> and <sched.h>) have been included, and that the thread to be created is called new_thread() and is correctly prototyped and defined.

The most common way of creating a thread is to simply let the values default: 

pthread_create (NULL, NULL, new_thread, NULL);

In the above example, we've created our new thread with the defaults, and passed it a NULL as its one and only parameter (that's the third NULL in the pthread_create() call above).

Generally, you can pass anything you want (via the arg field) to your new thread. Here we're passing the number 123: 

pthread_create (NULL, NULL, new_thread, (void *) 123);

A more complicated example is to create a non-joinable thread with round-robin scheduling at priority 15: 

pthread_attr_t attr;

// initialize the attribute structure
pthread_attr_init (&attr);

// set the detach state to "detached"
pthread_attr_setdetachstate (&attr, PTHREAD_CREATE_DETACHED);

// override the default of INHERIT_SCHED
pthread_attr_setinheritsched (&attr, PTHREAD_EXPLICIT_SCHED);
pthread_attr_setschedpolicy (&attr, SCHED_RR);
attr.param.sched_priority = 15;

// finally, create the thread
pthread_create (NULL, &attr, new_thread, NULL);

To see what a multithreaded program looks like, you could run the pidin command from the shell. Say our program was called spud. If we run pidin once before spud created a thread and once after spud created two more threads (for three total), here's what the output would look like (I've shortened the pidin output to show only spud): 

# pidin
pid    tid name               prio STATE       Blocked
 12301   1 spud                10r READY

# pidin
pid    tid name               prio STATE       Blocked
 12301   1 spud                10r READY
 12301   2 spud                10r READY
 12301   3 spud                10r READY

As you can see, the process spud (process ID 12301) has three threads (under the tid column). The three threads are running at priority 10 with a scheduling algorithm of round robin (indicated by the r after the 10). All three threads are READY, meaning that they're able to use CPU but aren't currently running on the CPU (another, higher-priority thread, is currently running).

Now that we know all about creating threads, let's take a look at how and where we'd use them.

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