Re: Thread starvation with mutex

David Lloyd wrote:

>On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Gary S. Robertson wrote:
>
>>System/library function calls should be engineered to reliably perform
>>the operations their names and documentation suggest will occur when
>>they are invoked - otherwise they should return with an error.  In this
>>case, if the programmer calls pthread_mutex_unlock, then most likely the
>>intent is to yield the mutex to the next waiting pthread, if any.
>>
>
>I disagree, I would think that the intent for pthread_mutex_unlock would
>be to unlock the mutex according to the way POSIX Threads are supposed to
>unlock mutexes.  If I want to yield a mutex to another thread, I would use 
>a condition variable.
>
>- D
>
This would be appropriate if the desire is to yield the protected 
resource to a specific thread... it shouldn't be necessary to incur the 
extra overhead of a condition variable or a second system call if the 
intent is simply to the next unspecified thread which might be waiting 
on it.