lab 32 - lockfs
NAME lab 32 - lockfs DESCRIPTION I've struggled for a while trying to get multi-reader-single-writer locks (rwlock) working the way I wanted for a database I've been working on (more in a later lab). I recently realized the answer was in inferno all along. The problem was not in implementing a rwlock, which i had done for tickfs using channels and it worked fine, the problem came when I needed to kill a process that might be holding a lock. A lock based on using channels usually means that a spawned process is waiting for an event on a channel either to obtain or free the lock. However, if the process that holds a lock is killed it doesn't get to send the unlock event to the lock manager process. You might think, just don't kill the processes that might hold locks. But killing processes is sometimes hard to avoid. For example, when a Flush message arrives, or to cancel a query that launched multiple processes. Programs that depend on locking based merely on...