Reusable Barrier Algorithm

Question

I'm looking into the Reusable Barrier algorithm from the book "The Little Book Of Semaphores" (archived here).

The puzzle is on page 31 (Basic Synchronization Patterns/Reusable Barrier), and I have come up with a 'solution' (or not) which differs from the solution from the book (a two-phase barrier).

This is my 'code' for each thread:

# n = 4; threads running
# semaphore = n max., initialized to 0
# mutex, unowned.

start:
    mutex.wait()
        counter = counter + 1
        if counter = n:
            semaphore.signal(4) # add 4 at once
            counter = 0
    mutex.release()
    semaphore.wait()
        # critical section
    semaphore.release()
goto start

This does seem to work, I've even inserted different sleep timers into different sections of the threads, and they still wait for all the threads to come before continuing each and every loop. Am I missing something? Is there a condition that this will fail?

I've implemented this using the Windows library Semaphore and Mutex functions.

Update:

Thank you to starblue for the answer. Turns out that if for whatever reason a thread is slow between mutex.release() and semaphore.wait() any of the threads that arrive to semaphore.wait() after a full loop will be able to go through again, since there will be one of the N unused signals left.

And having put a Sleep command for thread number 3, I got this result where one can see that thread 3 missed a turn the first time, with thread 1 having done 2 turns, and then catching up on the second turn (which was in fact its 1st turn).

Thanks again to everyone for the input.

Answer 1

One thread could run several times through the barrier while some other thread doesn't run at all.