CST334 Rain Drop Lock Lock

We had our midterm this week!  Even though it was open book, open internet, I was challenged.  I thought I understood paging, page segmentation, page tables and entries, etc better but even with the material in front of me, I struggled.  The caching wasn't as much of a challenge, but I had a block when visualizing the segmented page table or indices.  

 This week was all about the concept of mutual exclusion and mutex objects.  We lock and unlock mutex objects to make sure that, during multi-threaded programming, the OS is not interrupting a specific block of code during some critical moment.  Even a line of C as simple as int counter += counter is not as simple as a single step.  A scheculding timer interrupt could pause this calculation and some other thread could totally mess it up by accessing the same shared variables and performing it's own logic on them. 

I had been spooked by multi-threaded libraries when I tried to do some python tasks in the past.  I wanted background functions to continue working and stop blocking my main UI, but I couldn't the hang of it.  I'm eager to circle back and see if the reading of those libraries and solutions make more sense now that I understand some of the fundamentals.

Unless I get further spooked by these semaphores which have a weird sort of dark foreshadowing in this week's lectures. 

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