Check to see if a pthread mutex is locked or unlocked (After a thread has locked itself)

Question

I need to see if a mutex is locked or unlocked in an if statement so I check it like this...

if(mutex[id] != 2){
    /* do stuff */
}

but w

Answer 1

Mutexes are not the right primitive for the scheme that you want to implement. You should be using condition variables:

int run_thread_a = 0;
pthread_mutex_t run_lock_a = PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER;
pthread_cond_t run_cond_a = PTHREAD_COND_INITIALIZER;

int run_thread_b = 0;
pthread_mutex_t run_lock_b = PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER;
pthread_cond_t run_cond_b = PTHREAD_COND_INITIALIZER;

/* thread A */
while (1) {
    /* Wait for Thread A to be runnable */
    pthread_mutex_lock(&run_lock_a);
    while (!run_thread_a)
        pthread_cond_wait(&run_cond_a, &run_lock_a);
    run_thread_a = 0;
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&run_lock_a);

    /* Do some work */

    /* Now wake thread B */
    pthread_mutex_lock(&run_lock_b);
    run_thread_b = 1;
    pthread_cond_signal(&run_cond_b);
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&run_lock_b);
}

/* thread B */
while (1) {
    /* Wait for Thread B to be runnable */
    pthread_mutex_lock(&run_lock_b);
    while (!run_thread_b)
        pthread_cond_wait(&run_cond_b, &run_lock_b);
    run_thread_b = 0;
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&run_lock_b);

    /* Do some work */

    /* Now wake thread A */
    pthread_mutex_lock(&run_lock_a);
    run_thread_a = 1;
    pthread_cond_signal(&run_cond_a);
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&run_lock_a);
}

Each thread will block in pthread_cond_wait() until the other thread signals it to wake up. This will not deadlock.

It can easily be extended to many threads, by allocating one int, pthread_cond_t and pthread_mutex_t per thread.