A class which provides a relatively platform-independent Mutual Exclusion thread synchronization primitive. More...

#include "system-mutex.h"

Public Member Functions
	SystemMutex ()

	~SystemMutex ()

void	Lock ()
	Acquire ownership of the Mutual Exclusion object. More...

void	Unlock ()
	Release ownership of the Mutual Exclusion object. More...

Private Attributes
SystemMutexPrivate *	m_priv
	The (system-dependent) implementation. More...

Detailed Description

A class which provides a relatively platform-independent Mutual Exclusion thread synchronization primitive.

When more than one thread needs to access a shared resource (data structure or device), the system needs to provide a way to serialize access to the resource. An operating system will typically provide a Mutual Exclusion primitive to provide that capability. We provide platform-independent access to the OS-dependent capability with the SystemMutex class.

There are two operations: Lock and Unlock. Lock allows an executing SystemThread to attempt to acquire ownership of the Mutual Exclusion object. If the SystemMutex object is not owned by another thread, then ownership is granted to the calling SystemThread and Lock returns immediately, However, if the SystemMutex is already owned by another SystemThread, the calling SystemThread is blocked until the current owner releases the SystemMutex by calling Unlock.