Hi, "The little book of semaphones" (287 pages) is available at http://greenteapress.com/semaphores/ It has a slightly better solution that uses two mutexes and a count, see the Readers-writers problem, section 4.2 page 67 (pdf page 79). It also goes on to discuss fairness and starvation and writer (i.e. exclusive) priority. -- Chris Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
John Goerzen wrote:
Hello,
I have the need for a locking object that can provide shared and exclusive locks in much the same manner as the POSIX flock() function.
A thread that acquires an exclusive lock has a guarantee that no other thread holds any locks.
A thread that acquires a shared lock has a guarantee that no other thread holds an exclusive lock, though any number of other threads hold shared locks.
My intuition tells me that this could be implemented in terms of an MVar somehow. (At least, I've used MVars for simple locks for quite some time.) But I can't quite figure out how. Any ideas?
Thanks,
-- John
STM or IO ?
You need a count of shared locks "S", *Var Word32.
To increase the count "S", you need to hold a mutex "E", *Var (). So (take mutex "E" >> increment "S" >> release "E") is the the combined operation.
To decrease the count "S", you do not need to hold a mutex. (decrement "S").
By grabbing the mutex "E" and waiting for "S" to go to zero, you have acquired exclusive control. When you are done just release "E".