Basic Concepts

Semaphores can best be described as counters used to control access to shared resources by multiple processes. They are most often used as a locking mechanism to prevent processes from accessing a particular resource while another process is performing operations on it. Semaphores are often dubbed the most difficult to grasp of the three types of System V IPC objects. In order to fully understand semaphores, we'll discuss them briefly before engaging any system calls and operational theory.

The name semaphore is actually an old railroad term, referring to the crossroad ``arms'' that prevent cars from crossing the tracks at intersections. The same can be said about a simple semaphore set. If the semaphore is on (the arms are up), then a resource is available (cars may cross the tracks). However, if the semaphore is off (the arms are down), then resources are not available (the cars must wait).

While this simple example may stand to introduce the concept, it is important to realize that semaphores are actually implemented as sets, rather than as single entities. Of course, a given semaphore set might only have one semaphore, as in our railroad example.

Perhaps another approach to the concept of semaphores, is to think of them as resource counters. Let's apply this concept to another real world scenario. Consider a print spooler, capable of handling multiple printers, with each printer handling multiple print requests. A hypothetical print spool manager will utilize semaphore sets to monitor access to each printer.

Assume that in our corporate print room, we have 5 printers online. Our print spool manager allocates a semaphore set with 5 semaphores in it, one for each printer on the system. Since each printer is only physically capable of printing one job at a time, each of our five semaphores in our set will be initialized to a value of 1 (one), meaning that they are all online, and accepting requests.

John sends a print request to the spooler. The print manager looks at the semaphore set, and finds the first semaphore which has a value of one. Before sending John's request to the physical device, the print manager decrements the semaphore for the corresponding printer by a value of negative one (-1). Now, that semaphore's value is zero. In the world of System V semaphores, a value of zero represents 100% resource utilization on that semaphore. In our example, no other request can be sent to that printer until it is no longer equal to zero.

When John's print job has completed, the print manager increments the value of the semaphore which corresponds to the printer. Its value is now back up to one (1), which means it is available again. Naturally, if all 5 semaphores had a value of zero, that would indicate that they are all busy printing requests, and that no printers are available.

Although this was a simple example, please do not be confused by the initial value of one (1) which was assigned to each semaphore in the set. Semaphores, when thought of as resource counters, may be initialized to any positive integer value, and are not limited to either being zero or one. If it were possible for each of our five printers to handle 10 print jobs at a time, we could initialize each of our semaphores to 10, decrementing by one for every new job, and incrementing by one whenever a print job was finished. As you will discover in the next chapter, semaphores have a close working relationship with shared memory segments, acting as a watchdog to prevent multiple writes to the same memory segment.

Before delving into the associated system calls, lets take a brief tour through the various internal data structures utilized during semaphore operations.