Xv6 Locking

Locking

Learning xv6-riscv-book Chapter 5 Locking

Concurrency: situations in which multiple instruction sreams are interleaved, due to multiprocessor parallelism, threasd switching, or interrupts.

Concurrency control: strategies aimed at correctness under concurrency.

Lock: provides mutual exclusion – ensurign that only one CPU at a time can hold the lock.

Race conditions

Race condition:

• a memory location is accessed concurrently
• at list one write

E.g. two CPUs execute list.push at the same time:

struct element {
   
    int data;
    struct element *next;
};

struct element *list = 0;

void
push(int data) 
{
   
    struct element *l;
    
    l = malloc(sizeof *l