This chapter describes the API for creating and destroying condition variables, notifying condition variables of changes in monitored data, and making a thread wait on such notification.
Conditions are closely associated with a single monitor, which typically consists of a mutex, one or more condition variables, and the monitored data. The association between a condition and a monitor is established when a condition variable is created, and the association persists for its life. In addition, a static association exists between the condition and some data within the monitor. This data is what will be manipulated by the program under the protection of the monitor.
A call to PR_WaitCondVar causes a thread to block until a specified condition variable receives notification of a change of state in its associated monitored data. Other threads may notify the condition variable when changes occur.
For an introduction to NSPR thread synchronization, including locks and condition variables, see Introduction to NSPR.
For reference information on NSPR locks, see Locks.
NSPR provides a special type, PRMonitor, for use with Java. Unlike a mutex of type PRLock, which can have multiple associated condition variables of type PRCondVar, a mutex of type PRMonitor has a single, implicitly associated condition variable. For information about PRMonitor, see Monitors.