Building a Lock

By now, you should have some understanding of how a lock works, from the perspective of a programmer. But how do you build a lock? What hardware support is needed? What OS support? It is this set of questions we address in the rest of the lessons in this chapter.

THE CRUX: HOW TO BUILD A LOCK

How can you build an efficient lock? Efficient locks provide mutual exclusion at low cost, and also might attain a few other properties we discuss below. What hardware support is needed? What OS support?