Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian

Overview of this book

The Linux OS and its embedded and server applications are critical components of today’s software infrastructure in a decentralized, networked universe. The industry's demand for proficient Linux developers is only rising with time. Hands-On System Programming with Linux gives you a solid theoretical base and practical industry-relevant descriptions, and covers the Linux system programming domain. It delves into the art and science of Linux application programming— system architecture, process memory and management, signaling, timers, pthreads, and file IO. This book goes beyond the use API X to do Y approach; it explains the concepts and theories required to understand programming interfaces and design decisions, the tradeoffs made by experienced developers when using them, and the rationale behind them. Troubleshooting tips and techniques are included in the concluding chapter. By the end of this book, you will have gained essential conceptual design knowledge and hands-on experience working with Linux system programming interfaces.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Using the pthread APIs for synchronization

Now that we have covered the required theoretical background information, let's move on with the actual practice: for the remainder of this chapter, we shall focus on how to use the pthreads API to perform synchronization, thus avoiding races.

We have learned that to protect writable shared data of any kind in a critical section, we require locking. The pthreads API provides the mutex lock for exactly this use case; we intend to hold the lock for a short while only—the duration of the critical section.

There are scenarios, though, in which we require a different kind of synchronization—we require to synchronize based on a certain data element's value; the pthreads API provides the condition variable (CV) for this use case.

Let's cover these in turn.

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