Operating Systems · Concurrency

Race conditions and critical sections

What goes wrong when two threads touch the same data at the same time without coordination.

Also known as: data races, critical section problem.

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• Threads: Multiple independent execution paths sharing one process's address space.

Leads to

• Locks and mutual exclusion: A lock that lets only one thread at a time execute a critical section.

Related topics

• Locks and mutual exclusion: A lock that lets only one thread at a time execute a critical section.