Multithreading and mutexes

Question

I'm currently beginning development on an indie game in C using the Allegro cross-platform library. I figured that I would separate things like input, sound, game engine, and graphics into their own separate threads to increase the program's robustness. Having no experience in multithreading whatsoever, my question is:

If I have a section of data in memory (say, a pointer to a data structure), is it okay for one thread to write to it at will and another to read from it at will, or would each thread have to use a mutex to lock the memory, then read or write, then unlock?

In particular, I was thinking about the interaction between the game engine and the video renderer. (This is in 2D.) My plan was for the engine to process user input, then spit out the appropriate audio and video to be fed to the speakers and monitor. I was thinking that I'd have a global pointer to the next bitmap to be drawn on the screen, and the code for the game engine and the renderer would be something like this:

ALLEGRO_BITMAP *nextBitmap;
boolean using;

void GameEngine ()
  {

  ALLEGRO_BITMAP *oldBitmap;

  while (ContinueGameEngine())
    {
    ALLEGRO_BITMAP *bitmap = al_create_bitmap (width, height);
    MakeTheBitmap (bitmap);
    while (using) ; //The other thread is using the bitmap. Don't mess with it!
    al_destroy_bitmap (nextBitmap);
    nextBitmap = bitmap;
    }

  }

void Renderer ()
  {

  while (ContinueRenderer())
    {
    ALLEGRO_BITMAP *bitmap = al_clone_bitmap (nextBitmap);
    DrawBitmapOnScreen (bitmap);
    }

  }

This seems unstable... maybe something would happen in the call to al_clone_bitmap but I am not quite certain how to handle something like this. I would use a mutex on the bitmap, but mutexes seem like they take time to lock and unlock and I'd like both of these threads (especially the game engine thread) to run as fast as possible. I also read up on something called a condition, but I have absolutely no idea how a condition would be applicable or useful, although I'm sure they are. Could someone point me to a tutorial on mutexes and conditions (preferably POSIX, not Windows), so I can try to figure all this out?

Answer 1

If I have a section of data in memory (say, a pointer to a data structure), is it okay for one thread to write to it at will and another to read from it at will

The answer is "it depends" which usually means "no".

Depending on what you're writing/reading, and depending on the logic of your program, you could wind up with wild results or corruption if you try writing and reading with no synchronization and you're not absolutely sure that writes and reads are atomic.

So you should just use a mutex unless:

1. You're absolutely sure that writes and reads are atomic, and you're absolutely sure that one thread is only reading (ideally you'd use some kind of specific support for atomic operations such as the Interlocked family of functions from WinAPI).
2. You absolutely need the tiny performance gain from not locking.

Also worth noting that your while (using); construct would be a lot more reliable, correct, and would probably even perform better if you used a spin lock (again if you're absolutely sure you need a spin lock, rather than a mutex).