Is Pthread library actually a user thread solution?

The title might not be clear enough because I don't know how to define my questions actually.

I understand Pthread is a thread library meeting POSIX standard (about POSIX, see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posix). It is available in Unix-like OS.

About thread, I read that there are three different models:

User level thread: the kernel does not know it. User himself creates/implements/destroy threads.

Kernel level thread: kernel directly supports multiple threads of control in a process.

Light weight process(LWP): scheduled by kernel but can be bounded with user threads.

Did you see my confusion? When I call pthread_create() to create a thread, did I create a user level thread? I guess so. So can I say, Pthread offers a user level solution for threads? It can not manipulate kernel/LWP?

Solution 1:

@paulsm4 I am doubtful about your comment that kernel knows every thing. In this particular context of user level threads, the kernel is unaware of the fact that such a thing is happening. A user level thread's scheduling is maintained by the user himself (via the interface provided by a library) and the kernel ends up allotting just a single kernel thread to the whole process. Kernel would treat the process as a single threaded and any blocking call by one of the threads would end up blocking all the threads of that process. Refer to http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/OpSystems/Myos/threads.htm

Solution 2:

In Linux, pthread is implemented as a lightweight process. Kernel (v2.6+) is actually implemented with NPTL. Let me quote the wiki content:

NPTL is a so-called 1×1 threads library, in that threads created by the user (via the pthread_create() library function) are in 1-1 correspondence with schedulable entities in the kernel (tasks, in the Linux case). This is the simplest possible threading implementation.

So pthread in linux kernel is actually implemented as kernel thread.