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Top Forums Programming Posix Semaphore Use - Releasing all resources? Post 302396847 by Loic Domaigne on Friday 19th of February 2010 12:47:54 PM
Old 02-19-2010
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
Quote:
Originally Posted by Loic Domaigne
Well, it's a tradition in POSIX threads to avoid semaphores whenever possible
How come?
Well, this is a joke coming from the comp.programming.threads NG.

The reason behind this joke is: in most of the cases, POSIX threads offers synchronization mechanisms that surpass what semaphores can offer. For instance, a mutex could be seen as a binary semaphore. But mutex is more efficient in the uncontended case (indeed, there is no kernel involvement. This is not the case for semaphore). Beside that, mutex can offer priority inheritance, something impossible with semaphore.

From my own experience, most of the time where semaphores are used in Pthreads program often results from a lack of Pthreads understanding. There are only very few specific cases where semaphores make more sense.

Cheers,
Loïc.
 

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SEM_GETVALUE(3) 					   BSD Library Functions Manual 					   SEM_GETVALUE(3)

NAME
sem_getvalue -- get the value of a semaphore LIBRARY
POSIX Real-time Library (librt, -lrt) SYNOPSIS
#include <semaphore.h> int sem_getvalue(sem_t * restrict sem, int * restrict sval); DESCRIPTION
The sem_getvalue() function sets the variable pointed to by sval to the current value of the semaphore pointed to by sem, as of the time that the call to sem_getvalue() is actually run. RETURN VALUES
The sem_getvalue() function returns the value 0 if successful; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error. ERRORS
sem_getvalue() will fail if: [EINVAL] sem points to an invalid semaphore. SEE ALSO
sem_post(3), sem_trywait(3), sem_wait(3) STANDARDS
sem_getvalue() conforms to ISO/IEC 9945-1:1996 (``POSIX.1''). The value of the semaphore is never negative, even if there are threads blocked on the semaphore. POSIX is somewhat ambiguous in its wording with regard to what the value of the semaphore should be if there are blocked waiting threads, but this behavior is conformant, given the wording of the specification. BSD
January 22, 2003 BSD
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