Final answer:
The most common technique for protecting a critical section in Linux is the use of mutexes, which ensure that only one thread can access shared resources at a time to prevent data corruption.
Step-by-step explanation:
The most common technique used for protecting a critical section in Linux is the use of mutexes (mutual exclusions).
A critical section is a part of code that accesses shared resources and must not be executed by more than one thread or process simultaneously to prevent data corruption or inconsistencies.
To ensure that only one thread can enter a critical section at a time, Linux provides several synchronization mechanisms, among which the mutex is the most commonly used.
Mutexes work by only allowing one thread to lock the critical section at a time. When the section is locked by one thread, other threads attempting to enter it will be blocked until the mutex is unlocked.
This is done through system calls such as pthread_mutex_lock and pthread_mutex_unlock in POSIX-compliant systems, which Linux is.
The most common technique used for protecting a critical section in Linux is the use of a mutex (short for mutual exclusion).
A mutex is a synchronization primitive that only allows one thread to access the critical section at a time, preventing race conditions and ensuring data integrity. When a thread wants to enter the critical section, it must first acquire the mutex. If the mutex is already locked by another thread, the requesting thread will be put to sleep until the mutex is released.