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What is Multitasking?A thread (also called a task) is a sequential path of execution. The discrete statements of a thread are processed sequentially according to the semantics of C, C++, or Pascal. The term multitasking means that several sequential tasks are processed in parallel. However, on single processor systems, several tasks cannot run at the same time; therefore, task switches must be performed. This is the job of a multitasking system like RTKernel-32. In many cases, tasks cannot run completely independently of each other, but are expected to cooperate. For example, it may be required that a certain task can only continue to run after another task has completed a certain operation. In such a case, the tasks involved must be synchronized, i.e., the parallelism of tasks is restricted again. Synchronization can be accomplished using inter-task communication. For a good understanding of parallel programming, it is important to be aware of the different requirements of multitasking systems. The following two sections discuss the most important differences between time sharing and real-time systems.
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