Monitors: an operating system structuring concept

  • Authors:
  • C. A. R. Hoare

  • Affiliations:
  • The Queen's Univ. of Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1974

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Abstract

This paper develops Brinch-Hansen's concept of a monitor as a method of structuring an operating system. It introduces a form of synchronization, describes a possible method of implementation in terms of semaphores and gives a suitable proof rule. Illustrative examples include a single resource scheduler, a bounded buffer, an alarm clock, a buffer pool, a disk head optimizer, and a version of the problem of readers and writers.