International Business Machines Corporation

John Arthur Helmbold

Donald Fred Ault

Ernest Scott Bender

Jon K Franks

In response to the detection of an external event by the first thread, the first thread sends a quiesce event to each additional thread of the application and suspends execution. The quiesce event may be either a suspension event requesting suspension of the additional threads or a termination event requesting termination of the additional threads. Each additional thread, upon receiving the quiesce event, checks its environment to determine whether it is holding any critical system resource. If the additional thread determines that is not holding any critical system resource and that it is therefore safe to quiesce, the additional thread quiesces. Before quiescing, the last additional thread to quiesce resumes the first thread, which is now free to perform critical operations without interference from the additional threads. If the quiesce type is suspension, the first thread resumes the additional threads upon completing its critical operations, whereupon the application resumes its normal operation.

Quiensce termination/suspension in a multithreaded enviroment

A method and apparatus for ensuring that a process interacting with a failing process is notified of the failure of that process. Each process has a unique process identifier (PID) associated with it. Each process optionally has an affinity list containing one or more entries, each of which contains the identifier of a process that is to be notified when the process fails. A process updates the affinity list of a target process (either itself or another process) by calling an affinity service of the operating system (OS) kernel, specifying the type of operation (add or delete), the identifier of the target process, the identifier of the process that is to notified, and the type of event that is to be generated for the process that is to be notified. When a process fails, a process termination service of the OS kernel examines the affinity list of the failing process and, for each entry in the list, generates an event of the specified type for the process specified as to be notified.

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John Arthur Helmbold