What is meant by “blocking system call”?

Question

What is the meaning of \"blocking system call\"?

In my operating systems course, we are studying multithreaded programming. I\'m unsure what is meant when I read in my t

Answer 1

I would suggest having a read on this very short text: http://files.mkgnu.net/files/upstare/UPSTARE_RELEASE_0-12-8/manual/html-multi/x755.html In particular you can read there why blocking system calls can be a worry with threads, not just with concurrent processes:

This is particularly problematic for multi-threaded applications since one thread blocking on a system call may indefinitely delay the update of the code of another thread.

Hope it helps.