I found the inspiration for this article while working on a consultancy job: Priority inversion. In computer science, priority inversion is a (potential) problematic scenario in scheduling in which a high priority task is indirectly preempted by a medium priority task effectively inverting the relative priorities of the two tasks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion) To put it more […]
User level spin locks revisited
This article was written – quite a few years ago – but recent activities made it worthwhile to take another look at it, revise the content and give it an overhaul to alleviate and clear up some of the inaccuracies. It starts with a quote and excerpt from the book Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, Third […]
Mutexes and semaphores: two concepts for two different use cases
Introduction There has always been (and there still is) confusion on terminology and usage of mutexes and semaphores. The main reason is that the term ‘semaphore’ has a different meaning depending on the context. We need to distinguish two contexts or levels: the concept and usage level, and the implementation level. This article is about the […]
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