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To enter a critical section, a thread must obtain a semaphore, which it releases on leaving the section. Other threads are prevented from entering the critical section at the same time as the original thread, but are free to gain control of the CPU and execute other code, including other critical sections that are protected by different semaphores.
In computer science, a semaphore is a variable or abstract data type used to control access to a common resource by multiple threads and avoid critical section problems in a concurrent system such as a multitasking operating system. Semaphores are a type of synchronization primitive. A trivial semaphore is a plain variable that is changed (for ...
In software engineering, double-checked locking (also known as "double-checked locking optimization" [1]) is a software design pattern used to reduce the overhead of acquiring a lock by testing the locking criterion (the "lock hint") before acquiring the lock. Locking occurs only if the locking criterion check indicates that locking is required.
lock contention: this occurs whenever one process or thread attempts to acquire a lock held by another process or thread. The more fine-grained the available locks, the less likely one process/thread will request a lock held by the other. (For example, locking a row rather than the entire table, or locking a cell rather than the entire row);
CAS can be used to achieve wait-free mutual exclusion for any shared data structure by creating a linked list where each node represents the desired operation to be performed. CAS is then used to change the pointers in the linked list [6] during the insertion of a new node. Only one process can be successful in its CAS; all other processes ...
A common use might be to control access to a data structure in memory that cannot be updated atomically and is invalid (and should not be read by another thread) until the update is complete. Readers–writer locks are usually constructed on top of mutexes and condition variables, or on top of semaphores.
A lock file is often the best approach if the resource to be controlled is not a regular file at all, so using methods for locking files does not apply. For example, a lock file might govern access to a set of related resources, such as several different files, directories, a group of disk partitions, or selected access to higher level ...
In this solution of the readers/writers problem, the first reader must lock the resource (shared file) if such is available. Once the file is locked from writers, it may be used by many subsequent readers without having them to re-lock it again. Before entering the critical section, every new reader must go through the entry section. However ...