From the course: IoT Foundations: Operating Systems Fundamentals
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Thread safety
From the course: IoT Foundations: Operating Systems Fundamentals
Thread safety
- [Instructor] In a multitask environment, thread safety is crucial to ensure correct program behavior. One common issue related to thread safety is the race condition, where multiple threads access shared resources simultaneously, leading to unpredictable results. To address this, operating systems typically provide synchronization primitives such as mutexes, semaphores, and critical sections to enforce thread-safe operations. A race condition is an undesirable situation that occurs when multiple tasks or threads attempt to access or modify shared data without the proper synchronization. Here, we present an example where two tasks attempt to access a globally defined integer variable, A, initialized to 1. Both Task 1 and the Task 2 can modify A at any time. If Task 1 updates and uses A within this function, it may not receive the expected value, since Task 2 might modify it concurrently. This race condition can lead to program instability and hard to trace bugs. To prevent this, we…
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