Now that we have covered the required theoretical background information, let's move on with the actual practice: for the remainder of this chapter, we shall focus on how to use the pthreads API to perform synchronization, thus avoiding races.
We have learned that to protect writable shared data of any kind in a critical section, we require locking. The pthreads API provides the mutex lock for exactly this use case; we intend to hold the lock for a short while only—the duration of the critical section.
There are scenarios, though, in which we require a different kind of synchronization—we require to synchronize based on a certain data element's value; the pthreads API provides the condition variable (CV) for this use case.
Let's cover these in turn.
