>Off the top of my head, I can't see why developers
>would choose mutexes over rw-semaphores. If you take
>the write-lock then you have exclusive access to the
>resource, exactly as with a mutex. There's nothing
>that says you can't read the resource as well, and so
>I don't really understand your
For example, any potential contention issue where two
execution threads want to read the same data
structures and don't want to write. A mutex serialises
these threads whereas a rw-semaphore would allow them
to execute concurrently.
The only example I can think of off the top of my head
is multip
>I have noticed that ALSA tends to use mutexes a lot
>for its internal locking. Has anyone ever considered
>using rw-semaphores instead? The biggest impact would
>probably be to the /proc filesystem since it would
>allow multiple concurrent readers, but I suppose that
>it might also reduce other c
