Study of Synchronization Mechanisms In Unix, Windows NT, and Mac OS
Abstract
In the world of operating systems, the wheels of progress tum rather slowly. Operating systems take years to develop. Communication between processes is an important and difficult topic in operating systems. Studies of interactions and communications among processes have resulted in new synchronization primitives. Existing commercial and popular operating systems use different synchronization mechanisms to achieve kernel based synchronization as well as to provide synchronization facilities for applications. Each of these synchronization mechanisms has its advantages and disadvantages. The objective of this thesis work was to conduct a comparative study on how synchronization is achieved in UNIX, Windows NT, and Apple Macintosh operating systems. A detailed study on how synchronization is achieved in these operating systems was carried out. Based on this study the operating systems were compared and the results were tabulated. The comparative study indicates that among other things UNIX and Windows NT are preemptive multitasking and symmetric multiprocessing operating systems; Apple Macintosh is a cooperative multitasking and master-slave multiprocessing operating system; Thread is the basic unit of scheduling in Windows NT and in recent versions of UNIX such as Solaris 2.5; and in a multiprocessor environment, both UNIX and Windows NT use Spin Locks for achieving synchronization.
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- OSU Theses [15752]