Practical C Programming

Mutual exclusion

To avoid ambiguity when two or more threads access the same resource, mutual exclusion implements serializing access to the shared resources. When one thread is using a resource, no other thread is allowed to access the same resource. All of the other threads are blocked from accessing the same resource until the resource is free again.

A mutex is basically a lock that is associated with the shared resource. To read or modify the shared resource, a thread must first acquire the lock for that resource. Once a thread acquires a lock (or mutex) for that resource, it can go ahead with processing that resource. All of the other threads that wish to work on it will be compelled to wait until the resource is unlocked. When the thread ...