Summary
This paper presents a proposal for synchronizing primitives obtained as an extension of Dijkstra's P, V primitives. The extended primitives are shown to be complete: they can represent any desired interaction between processes without the use of conditionals. The usefulness of these primitives is illustrated by presenting simple solutions to a series of coordination problems of increasing complexity. Two selected problems are used to illustrate disadvantages of existing synchronizing mechanisms. The extended primitives shift some of the burden from the programmer to the system since they are easier to use but more difficult to implement. However, even though each primitive operation may take longer to execute (as compared to the simple P, V primitives) the total system overhead can be substantially less especially for complex coordination problems. The paper presents a straightforward but efficient implementation of the extended primitives.
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This work was supported in part by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commision under contract AT(11-1 3288) and in part by the Joint Services Electronics Program under contract AFOSR F4620-76-C-0089
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Agerwala, T. Some extended semaphore primitives. Acta Informatica 8, 201–220 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264467
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264467