Synchronization

In a multithreaded environment where memory, peripherals, and system accesses are shared, a system should provide synchronization mechanisms to allow the tasks to cooperate on the arbitration of the access to system-wide available resources.

Mutexes and semaphores are two of the most commonly used mechanisms of synchronization between parallel threads as they provide the minimal set to solve most concurrency problems. Functions that could block the calling tasks must be able to interact with the scheduler, to move the task to the waiting state whenever the resource is not available and until the lock is released or the semaphore is incremented.

Semaphores

A semaphore is the most common synchronization primitive, which provides a counter with exclusive access, and it is used by two or more threads to cooperate on the arbitration of the usage of a specific shared resource. The API provided to the tasks must guarantee that the object can be used to implement a...