Catalog of Atomic Operations in UNIX/POSIX Systems for Thread-Safe Programming
By
onurkanbkrc
If you only eat one bagel today, this is the bagel.
Summary
This article presents a catalog of atomic operations available in UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems that can be used as building blocks for creating thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without requiring mutexes or read/write locks. The author advocates for leveraging kernel-level atomic operations rather than implementing custom locking mechanisms, arguing that kernel developers are more trustworthy and that it's inefficient to lock around operations that are already atomic at the kernel level. The catalog is presented as a living document expected to be updated frequently.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledThis is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks.
The philosophy here is to let the kernel do as much work as possible. At my most pessimistic, I trust the kernel developers more than I trust myself.
More practically, it's stupid to spend CPU time locking around an operation that's already atomic at the kernel level.
The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
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