Mutual exclusion strategy

[Arjay]

*sigh* I wish people showed this much interest to my intellisense thread

This thread is more interesting than trying to figure out why intellisense doesn't work in a 7 year old environment.

I'm not trying to prevent the same thread entering the critical section recursively. I know it was designed that way. I'm trying to prevent it (especially the producer) to enter the CS ten times in a row.

My point is that if you need different behavior from what a critical section can do, then you need to use a different synchronization object. A cs can't limit a thread to a specific number of locks in a row.

And I'm not happy about polling either. But I'm using select() in the consumer thread and to set the writefds I need to see if there is something in the buffer, and to do that I need to return from select once in a while (hence maybe not polling frequent enough).

Polling just seems like a waste of resources when the consuming thread could wait for an event.

Producer allocating memory and enqueuing, consumer dequeueing and freeing memory will work I guess. With the additional penalty of allocating-deallocating memory.

Yes, but unless you have some very high speed requirements, using a queue probably won't be a performance bottleneck. You'll have to decide on that, but a queue sure would simplify the code.

And it looks like noone wants to touch fibers.

No one wants to touch fibers because we don't think they'll help.