Chapter 6: Synchronization

Tools
Instructor: Dr. Farzana

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Outline
▪ Background
▪ The Critical-Section Problem
▪ Peterson’s Solution
▪ Hardware Support for Synchronization
▪ Mutex Locks
▪ Semaphores
▪ Monitors
▪ Liveness
▪ Evaluation

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives
▪ Describe the critical-section problem and illustrate a
race condition
▪ Illustrate hardware solutions to the critical-section
problem using memory barriers, compare-and-swap
operations, and atomic variables
▪ Demonstrate how mutex locks, semaphores,
monitors, and condition variables can be used to
solve the critical section problem
▪ Evaluate tools that solve the critical-section problem
in low-, Moderate-, and high-contention scenarios

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Background
▪ Processes can execute concurrently
• May be interrupted at any time, partially completing execution
▪ Concurrent access to shared data may result in data
inconsistency
▪ Maintaining data consistency requires mechanisms to ensure the
orderly execution of cooperating processes
▪ We illustrated in chapter 4 the problem when we considered the
Bounded Buffer problem with use of a counter that is updated
concurrently by the producer and consumer,. Which lead to race
condition.

Threads and concurrency

Lecture
Concurrency in diagram is multithreading in single core
Parallelism is multithreading in multicore

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Race Condition
▪ Processes P0 and P1 are creating child processes using the fork()
system call
▪ Race condition on kernel variable next_available_pid which
represents the next available process identifier (pid)

▪ Unless there is a mechanism to prevent P0 and P1 from accessing the

variable next_available_pid the same pid could be assigned to
two different processes!

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Critical Section Problem
▪ Consider system of n processes {p0, p1, … pn-1}
▪ Each process has critical section segment of code
• Process may be changing common variables, updating table,
writing file, etc.
• When one process in critical section, no other may be in its
critical section
▪ Critical section problem is to design protocol to solve this
▪ Each process must ask permission to enter critical section in entry
section, may follow critical section with exit section, then
remainder section

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Critical Section

▪ General structure of process Pi

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Critical-Section Problem (Cont.)
Requirements for solution to critical-section problem

1. Mutual Exclusion - If process Pi is executing in its critical section,

then no other processes can be executing in their critical sections
2. Progress - If no process is executing in its critical section and there
exist some processes that wish to enter their critical section, then the
selection of the process that will enter the critical section next cannot
be postponed indefinitely
3. Bounded Waiting - A bound must exist on the number of times that
other processes are allowed to enter their critical sections after a
process has made a request to enter its critical section and before that
request is granted
• Assume that each process executes at a nonzero speed
• No assumption concerning relative speed of the n processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interrupt-based Solution
▪ Entry section: disable interrupts
▪ Exit section: enable interrupts
▪ Will this solve the problem?
• What if the critical section is code that runs for an hour?
• Can some processes starve – never enter their critical section.
• What if there are two CPUs?
If the second CPU process want to enter the critical section.Then 2nd CPU will remain idle.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Peterson’s Solution
▪ Two process solution
▪ Assume that the load and store machine-language
instructions are atomic; that is, cannot be interrupted
▪ The two processes share two variables:
Load and store for loading and storing the program
• int turn; from/to memory
• boolean flag[2]

▪ The variable turn indicates whose turn it is to enter the

critical section
▪ The flag array is used to indicate if a process is ready to
enter the critical section.
• flag[i] = true implies that process Pi is ready!

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Algorithm for Process Pi

while (true){

flag[i] = true;
turn = j;
while (flag[j] && turn = = j)
;

/* critical section */

flag[i] = false;

/* remainder section */

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Correctness of Peterson’s Solution

▪ Provable that the three CS requirement are met:

1. Mutual exclusion is preserved
Pi enters CS only if:
either flag[j] = false or turn = i
2. Progress requirement is satisfied
3. Bounded-waiting requirement is met

Agr p1 and p2 ne request k hui ha to kitni dafa p1 k critical section mil skta h p2 k mile begair

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Peterson’s Solution and Modern Architecture

▪ Although useful for demonstrating an algorithm, Peterson’s

Solution is not guaranteed to work on modern architectures.
• To improve performance, processors and/or compilers may
reorder operations that have no dependencies
▪ Understanding why it will not work is useful for better
understanding race conditions.
▪ For single-threaded this is ok as the result will always be the
same.
▪ For multithreaded the reordering may produce inconsistent or
unexpected results!

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Synchronization Hardware

▪ Many systems provide hardware support for implementing the

critical section code.
▪ Uniprocessors – could disable interrupts
• Currently running code would execute without preemption
• Generally too inefficient on multiprocessor systems
Operating systems using this not broadly scalable

▪ We will look at three forms of hardware support:
1. Hardware instructions

2. Atomic variables

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Hardware Instructions

▪ Special hardware instructions that allow us to either

test-and-modify the content of a word, or to swap the
contents of two words atomically (uninterruptedly.)
• Test-and-Set instruction
• Compare-and-Swap instruction

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 The test_and_set Instruction

▪ Definition
boolean test_and_set (boolean *target)
{
boolean rv = *target;
*target = true;
return rv:
}
▪ Properties
• Executed atomically
• Returns the original value of passed parameter
• Set the new value of passed parameter to true

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Solution Using test_and_set()
▪ Shared boolean variable lock, initialized to false
▪ Solution:
do {
while (test_and_set(&lock))
; /* do nothing */

/* critical section */

lock = false;
/* remainder section */
} while (true);

▪ Does it solve the critical-section problem?

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Semaphores

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Wait and Signal (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Types of semaphores

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 6.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018