Locking

This lecture covers the concept of locking as a synchronization mechanism in operating systems, focusing on the need for threads and processes to ensure mutual exclusion when accessing shared data. It discusses the transition from a 'free lunch' of single-core processors to the necessity of parallelism and concurrency in modern systems, explaining the challenges of race conditions and the importance of atomicity. The lecture delves into the implementation of locks, including test-and-set based spinlocks and the use of atomic instructions. It also addresses deadlock prevention strategies and best practices for efficient lock usage in OS kernel development.