Synchronization Primitive

Definitions

1. A low-level building block — such as a mutex, semaphore, spinlock, condition variable, or atomic operation — provided by the OS or language runtime to coordinate access to shared resources between concurrent threads or processes.

   In plain English: A basic tool the operating system provides to prevent multiple processes from interfering with each other when they share data.

   Example: "We replaced the coarse mutex with a read-write lock primitive so readers no longer block each other."

Related Terms

• semaphore
• Interrupt Handler
• Signal
• Thread
• Context Switch
• Lock
• Lock Contention
• Synchronization