After a nice discussion about the virtues of the current MacOS kernel as opposed to a Linux/BSD one, I did some performance testing. Yes, some stuff is slower on the Mac. But many people have accused ...

A thread of execution is a set of instructions that are managed by a scheduler. If you make a new thread separate from your program’s main thread, a new independent execution flow will be added to ...

I am interested in learning about programming with threads. I have heard it is a powerful, but often dangerous, addition to programs. I've studied about semaphores and locks and critical sections when ...

Developers wanting to add new locking primitives to the kernel tend to be received with a certain amount of skepticism. The kernel is already well equipped with locking mechanisms, and experience ...

The original design of futexes — a kernel interface to support Fast User-space muTEXes — introduced a four-byte memory location that would always be updated atomically. A key aspect of the design was ...