Don’t Forget Synchronization
Explore the importance of synchronization when multiple CPUs access shared data in operating systems. Understand how mutual exclusion with locks ensures data integrity and avoids concurrency problems such as race conditions and double free errors. This lesson highlights the balance between correctness and performance implications in multi-CPU environments.
Given that the caches do all of this work to provide coherence, do programs (or the OS itself) have to worry about anything when they access shared data? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, and is documented in great detail in the second piece of this course on the topic of concurrency. While we won’t get into the details here, we’ll sketch/review some of the basic ideas here (assuming you’re familiar with concurrency).
When accessing (and in particular, updating) shared data items or structures across CPUs, mutual ...