Funnel (Concurrent Computing) (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In Computer Science, a funnel is a synchronization primitive used in kernel development to protect system resources. First used on Digital UNIX as a way to "funnel" device driver execution onto a single processor, funnels are now used in the Mac OS X kernel to serialize access to the BSD portion of xnu. A funnel is a mutex that prevents more than one thread from accessing certain kernel resources at the same time. Each thread acquires a funnel when it enters a synchronized portion of the kernel, and releases it when it leaves.