Re: Why Semaphore Hardware-Dependent?

Arjan van de Ven
2006-08-28T07:31:11Z

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 03:22 +0800, Dong Feng wrote:
> Why can't we have a hardware-independent semaphore definition while we
> have already had hardware-dependent spinlock, rwlock, and rcu lock? It
> seems the semaphore definitions classified into two major categories.
> The main deference is whether there is a member variable _sleeper_.

btw semaphores are a deprecated construct mostly; mutexes are the way to
go for new code if they fit the usage model of mutexes. And mutexes are
indeed generic (with a architecture hook to allow a specific operation
to be optimized using assembly)