Re: a (radical ?) alternative to current chapter 4

Eric Salo (salo@mrjones.engr.sgi.com)
Tue, 2 Jul 1996 11:31:13 -0700

Is there a compelling reason to make the locks recursive? Seems to me that you
either have a lock or you don't; this smells more like a semaphore. For the
sake of simplicity, I guess my preference would be to make the locks
non-recursive. But if we do want more generality then I think we need to
provide more information in the API. For example, do we just want to return
TRUE if we already own the lock and try to grab it again? Maybe instead we
should have three possible return codes: TRUE, FALSE, and YOU_ALREADY_HAVE_IT.
Or we could just return an int, where zero means that you don't have it, in
which case we would also need a way to set the initial value.

-- 
Eric Salo         Silicon Graphics Inc.             "Do you know what the
(415)933-2998     2011 N. Shoreline Blvd, 8U-808     last Xon said, just
salo@sgi.com      Mountain View, CA   94043-1389     before he died?"