Synchronization
One of the challenges of multiprocessor systems is synchronizing access between the processors. In the early days of UNIX, it could be assumed that there was only one processor and only one kernel, and once that kernel started running, it had absolute control of the system. If the kernel had a critical sequence of instructions, it could turn off interrupts and execute that code without the risk of anything interrupting the flow. With multiprocessor systems, even with interrupts off, it is possible that two processors could try to access the same data at the same time. For an example of why this is a problem, consider the following code, which stores a value into a circular buffer, increments the index into the buffer, then wraps ...
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