
A process may never be removed from the semaphore queue in which it is suspended. Let S and Q be two semaphores initialized to 1.

We’ll need a mutable datatype to represent the text in the document. Suppose we’re building a multi-user editor, like Google Docs, that allows multiple people to connect to it and edit it at the same time.

You are not expected to read and understand all the code.Īll the relevant parts are excerpted below.
LOCKS MONITOR AND SEMAPHOR CODE
You can see all the code for this example on GitHub: edit buffer example.
LOCKS MONITOR AND SEMAPHOR HOW TO
Let’s see how to use synchronization to implement a threadsafe ADT. So the client is waiting for the server, and the server waiting for the client, and neither can make progress until the other one does. If a client fills up the server’s buffer with requests, and then blocks waiting to add another request, the server may then fill up the client’s buffer with results and then block itself. You can also have deadlock without using any locks.įor example, a message-passing system can experience deadlock when message buffers fill up. A is waiting for B which is waiting for C which is waiting for A. Now, each must acquire the lock on their “to” account: so A is waiting for B to release the account 2 lock, and B is waiting for A to release the account 1 lock.Ī and B are frozen in a “deadly embrace,” and accounts are locked up.ĭeadlock occurs when concurrent modules are stuck waiting for each other to do something.Ī deadlock may involve more than two modules: the signal feature of deadlock is a cycle of dependencies, e.g.

In the figure to the right, suppose A and B are making simultaneous transfers between two accounts in our bank.Ī transfer between accounts needs to lock both accounts, so that money can’t disappear from the system.Ī and B each acquire the lock on their respective “from” account: A acquires the lock on account 1, and B acquires the lock on account 2. This avoids the problem of reordering, ensuring that the owner of a lock is always looking at up-to-date data. Using a lock also tells the compiler and processor that you’re using shared memory concurrently, so that registers and caches will be flushed out to shared storage. Release relinquishes ownership of the lock, allowing another thread to take ownership of it.

If a thread tries to acquire a lock currently owned by another thread, it blocks until the other thread releases the lock.Īt that point, it will contend with any other threads that are trying to acquire the lock.Īt most one thread can own the lock at a time. Holding a lock is how one thread tells other threads: “I’m changing this thing, don’t touch it right now.”Īcquire allows a thread to take ownership of a lock. Since race conditions caused by concurrent manipulation of shared mutable data are disastrous bugs - hard to discover, hard to reproduce, hard to debug - we need a way for concurrent modules that share memory to synchronize with each other.Ī lock is an abstraction that allows at most one thread to own it at a time. The correctness of a concurrent program should not depend on accidents of timing.
