Expression of Parallelism

• Kernel will run on multiple processors

  • Most kernels have a notion of threads similar to user application threads
  • Multiple execution contexts in a single kernel address space
  • Threads will execute on only one CPU at a time
  • All execution in a thread is serialized with respect to itself
  • Most systems support migration of threads between processors
  • When to migrate is a design choice affecting load balancing and synchronization