Monitors: an operating system structuring concept
Communications of the ACM
On the duality of operating system structures
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
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Mutual exclusion between process and interrupt-driven execution is normally confined by the designer to passages within the kernel of an operating system and has been implemented traditionally by the judicious use of the interrupt inhibit instruction. This paper illustrates an alternative approach to the problem through the implementation of the conflicting software and hardware-driven kernel primitives as a limited set of concurrent subprocesses sharing a singular kernel domain. Manipulations of kernel data are rendered mutually exclusive through the use of P and V operations on simple semaphores associated with the data objects themselves. The kernel programmer is thereby relieved of real-time considerations in guarding his critical sections and the implementation of the kernel acquires a formalism which can greatly aid its verification, testability and maintainability.