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Interrupt disabling and enabling is a common approach to implementing mutual exclusion, what are its advantages and disadvantages?

Interrupt disabling and enabling is a common approach to implementing mutual exclusion,
what are its advantages and disadvantages?

Answers

Advantages:
- It actually succeeds in enforcing mutual exclusion.

Disadvantages:
- You have the result of busy waiting again, a poor approach. All other processes must simply wait for
the currently running one to finish, and any IRQs sent to the CPU during that period will be ignored.
Which, y’know, impedes progress.
- Obviously, only works in kernel mode.
- Does not work on multiprocessor systems.

Titany answered the question on April 26, 2022 at 05:25

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