Darryl Gove's blog

Volatile and Mutexes

A rough-and-ready guide to when to use the volatile keyword and when to use mutexes.

When you declare a variable to be volatile it ensures that the compiler always loads that variable from memory and immediately stores it back to memory after any operation on it.

For example:

int flag;

while (flag){}

In the absence of the volatile keyword the compiler will optimise this to:

if (!flag) while (1) {}

[If the flag is not zero to start with then the compiler assumes that there's nothing that can make it zero, so there is no exit condition on the loop.]

Not all shared data needs to be declared volatile. Only if you want one thread to see the effect of another thread.

[Example, if one thread populates a buffer, and another thread will later read from that buffer, then you don't need to declare the contents of the buffer as volatile. The important word being later, if you expect the two threads to access the buffer at the same time, then you would probably need the volatile keyword]

Mutexes are there to ensure exclusive access:

You will typically need to use them if you are updating a variable, or if you are performing a complex operation that should appear 'atomic'

For example:

volatile int total;

mutex_lock();
total+=5;
mutex_unlock();

You need to do this to avoid a data race, where another thread could also be updating total:

Here's the situation without the mutex:

Thread 1    Thread 2
Read total  Read total
Add 5       Add 5
Write total Write total

So total would be incremented by 5 rather than 10.

An example of a complex operation would be:

mutex_lock();
My_account = My_account - bill;
Their_account = Their_account + bill;
mutex_unlock();

You could use two separate mutexes, but then there would be a state where the amount bill would have been removed from My_account, but not yet placed into Their_account (this may or may not be a problem).

Posted at 10:48AM Mar 20, 2009 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |