Abstract
Looping by a process to wait for a condition consumes processor cycles without helping the awaited condition to become true. Other processes must be executed if we want the condition truthified. Since it is the operating system that multiplexes a processor among processes, wasted processor cycles are avoided if the operating system implements primitives to await and signal conditions. These primitives implement conditional atomic actions because they can block, but their execution also changes which processes the operating systems considers eligible for execution.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Schneider, F.B. (1997). Semaphores, Locks, and Conditional Critical Regions. In: On Concurrent Programming. Graduate Texts in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1830-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1830-2_10
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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