Meaning – The term mutual exclusion mechanism, refers to a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters a critical section while a concurrent thread of execution is already accessing a critical section, which refers to an interval of time during which a thread of execution accesses a shared resource.
A critical section is a data object, which two or more concurrent threads are trying to modify (where two concurrent read operations are permitted but, no two concurrent write operations or one read and one write are permitted since it leads to data inconsistency).
Example of usage – “The term mutual exclusion is also used in reference to the simultaneous writing of a memory address by one thread while the aforementioned memory address is being manipulated or read by one or more other threads.”
