Concurrency Primitives and Pitfalls

This lecture covers concurrency primitives and programming pitfalls in operating systems. It discusses the importance of threads for data sharing and exploiting multiple CPUs, as well as the challenges of uncontrolled thread scheduling leading to data races. The lecture explains mutual exclusion through locks and hardware atomic instructions like Test-and-Set and Compare-and-Swap. It delves into the use of condition variables and semaphores for conditional waiting, signaling, and avoiding concurrency bugs. The examples provided illustrate the implementation of condition variables and semaphores in producer/consumer scenarios. The lecture also addresses common bugs in concurrent programs such as atomicity violations, order violations, and deadlocks.