Ewald Cress looks at the SOS_WaitableAddress class next in his series on internals:
All the synchronisation mechanisms I have discussed so far have one things in common: in order to be globally visible, they involve synchronisation objects embedded within the things they protect. So for instance, if we want to protect the global scheduler list with a spinlock, that spinlock lives within the global scheduler list, and allocating the spinlock’s storage (lightweight as it is) is the responsibility of whoever creates that list. But what if there were millions of things we might occasionally want to lock, and we don’t want to embed a lock within each such item due to the hassle and/or overhead involved? What if we just wanted a publicly visible corkboard upon which we can pin notes describing the items which are currently locked?
This is a rather different locking structure than we’ve seen so far. Read on for details, including magic within the Signal method.