10.5: Condition variable implementation
- Page ID
- 40638
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The Cond structure I used in the previous section is a wrapper for a type called pthread_cond_t, which is defined in the POSIX threads API. It is very similar to Mutex, which is a wrapper for pthread_mutex_t. Both wrappers are defined in utils.c and utils.h.
Here’s the typedef:
typedef pthread_cond_t Cond;
make_cond allocates space, initializes the condition variable, and returns a pointer:
Cond *make_cond() {
Cond *cond = check_malloc(sizeof(Cond));
int n = pthread_cond_init(cond, NULL);
if (n != 0) perror_exit("make_cond failed");
return cond;
}
And here are the wrappers for cond_wait and cond_signal.
void cond_wait(Cond *cond, Mutex *mutex) {
int n = pthread_cond_wait(cond, mutex);
if (n != 0) perror_exit("cond_wait failed");
}
void cond_signal(Cond *cond) {
int n = pthread_cond_signal(cond);
if (n != 0) perror_exit("cond_signal failed");
}
At this point there should be nothing too surprising there.


