ACE Programmer's Guide, The: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming

Chapter 14. Thread Safety and Synchronization

We covered the basics of both thread safety and synchronization in Chapter 12, explaining how you can use mutexes and guards to ensure the safety of your global data and how condition variables can help two threads communicate events between each other synchronizing their actions. This chapter extends that discussion. In the safety arena, you will get to see readers/writer locks, the atomic operation wrapper, using tokens for fine-grain locking on data structures, and an introduction to recursive mutexes. We also introduce semaphores and barriers as new synchronization mechanisms.

14.1 Protection Primitives

To ensure consistency, multithreaded programs must use protection primitives around shared ...