Readers-writer lock

In computer science, a readers–writer (RW) or shared-exclusive lock (also known as a multiple readers/single-writer lock or multi-reader lock, or push lock) is a synchronization primitive that solves one of the readers–writers problems. An RW lock allows concurrent access for read-only operations, while write operations require exclusive access. This means that multiple threads can read the data in parallel but an exclusive lock is needed for writing or modifying data. When a writer is writing the data, all other writers or readers will be blocked until the writer is finished writing. A common use might be to control access to a data structure in memory that cannot be updated atomically and is invalid (and should not be read by another thread) until the update is complete.

Readers–writer locks are usually constructed on top of mutexes and condition variables, or on top of semaphores.

Some RW locks allow the lock to be atomically upgraded from being locked in read-mode to write-mode, as well as being downgraded from write-mode to read-mode. [1]

RW locks can be designed with different priority policies for reader vs. writer access. The lock can either be designed to always give priority to readers (read-preferring), to always give priority to writers (write-preferring) or be unspecified with regards to priority. These policies lead to different tradeoffs with regards to concurrency and starvation.

Several implementation strategies for readers–writer locks exist, reducing them to synchronization primitives that are assumed to pre-exist.

Raynal demonstrates how to implement an R/W lock using two mutexes and a single integer counter. The counter, b, tracks the number of blocking readers. One mutex, r, protects b and is only used by readers; the other, g (for "global") ensures mutual exclusion of writers. This requires that a mutex acquired by one thread can be released by another. The following is pseudocode for the operations:

...
Wikipedia