3.1. Synchronization

Solaris runs on a variety of different hardware platforms, including multiprocessor systems based on both the SPARC and Intel processors. Several multiprocessor architectures in existence today offer various trade-offs in performance and engineering complexity in both hardware and software. The current multiprocessor architecture that Solaris supports is the symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) and shared memory architecture, which implements a single kernel shared by all the processors and a single, uniform memory address space. To support such an architecture, the kernel must synchronize access to critical data to maintain data integrity, coherency, and state. The kernel synchronizes access by defining a lock for a particular ...

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