Critical sections

To control access to data structures that are shared between them, threads and processes use the standard POSIX primitives of mutexes, condvars, and semaphores. These work without change in an SMP system.

Many realtime systems also need to protect access to shared data structures between an interrupt handler and the thread that owns the handler. The traditional POSIX primitives used between threads aren't available for use by an interrupt handler. There are two solutions here:

• One is to remove all work from the interrupt handler and do all the work at thread time instead. Given our fast thread scheduling, this is a very viable solution.
• In a uniprocessor system running the QNX Neutrino RTOS, an interrupt handler may preempt a thread, but a thread will never preempt an interrupt handler. This allows the thread to protect itself from the interrupt handler by disabling and enabling interrupts for very brief periods of time.

The thread on a non-SMP system protects itself with code of the form:

InterruptDisable()
// critical section
InterruptEnable()

Or:

InterruptMask(intr)
// critical section
InterruptUnmask(intr)

Unfortunately, this code will fail on an SMP system since the thread may be running on one processor while the interrupt handler is concurrently running on another processor!

One solution would be to lock the thread to a particular processor (see “Bound Multiprocessing (BMP),” later in this chapter).

A better solution would be to use a new exclusion lock available to both the thread and the interrupt handler. This is provided by the following primitives, which work on both uniprocessor and SMP machines:

InterruptLock(intrspin_t* spinlock )

Attempt to acquire a spinlock, a variable shared between the interrupt handler and thread. The code will spin in a tight loop until the lock is acquired. After disabling interrupts, the code will acquire the lock (if it was acquired by a thread). The lock must be released as soon as possible (typically within a few lines of C code without any loops).

InterruptUnlock(intrspin_t* spinlock )

Release a lock and reenable interrupts.

On a non-SMP system, there's no need for a spinlock.

For more information, see the Multicore Processing chapter of the QNX Neutrino Programmer's Guide.