What is the difference between preemptive and cooperative multitasking in multithreading?

What is the difference between preemptive and cooperative multitasking in multithreading?

In multithreading, the main difference between preemptive and cooperative multitasking lies in how the threads are handled and scheduled by the operating system.

Preemptive multitasking is a technique where the operating system can interrupt and switch between threads at any point in time. This means that a higher priority thread can forcefully suspend a lower priority thread, allowing for efficient utilization of system resources. Preemptive multitasking is commonly used in modern operating systems to ensure fairness and responsiveness.

Cooperative multitasking, on the other hand, requires the threads to voluntarily yield control to other threads at predefined points in their execution. This means that a thread will continue running until it explicitly gives up control, which can lead to issues such as one misbehaving thread hogging the CPU and causing system instability.

In summary, preemptive multitasking allows the operating system to manage thread execution and prioritize tasks based on their importance, while cooperative multitasking relies on threads cooperating to share CPU resources.

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