Introduction to Locks
This lesson gives a brief introduction to this chapter on locks and its contents.
From the introduction to concurrency, you saw one of the fundamental problems in concurrent programming. You would like to execute a series of instructions atomically, but due to the presence of interrupts on a single processor (or multiple threads executing on multiple processors concurrently), you couldn’t. In this chapter, we thus attack this problem directly, with the introduction of something referred to as a lock. Programmers annotate source code with locks, putting them around critical sections, and thus ensure that any such critical section executes as if it were a single atomic instruction.
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