Recursive Lock (Mutex) vs Non-Recursive Lock (Mutex)

The difference between a recursive and non-recursive mutex has to do with ownership. In the case of a recursive mutex, the kernel has to keep track of the thread who actually obtained the mutex the first time around so that it can detect the difference between recursion vs. a different thread that should block instead. As another answer pointed out, there is a question of the additional overhead of this both in terms of memory to store this context and also the cycles required for maintaining it.

However, there are other considerations at play here too.

Because the recursive mutex has a sense of ownership, the thread that grabs the mutex must be the same thread that releases the mutex. In the case of non-recursive mutexes, there is no sense of ownership and any thread can usually release the mutex no matter which thread originally took the mutex. In many cases, this type of "mutex" is really more of a semaphore action, where you are not necessarily using the mutex as an exclusion device but use it as synchronization or signaling device between two or more threads.

Another property that comes with a sense of ownership in a mutex is the ability to support priority inheritance. Because the kernel can track the thread owning the mutex and also the identity of all the blocker(s), in a priority threaded system it becomes possible to escalate the priority of the thread that currently owns the mutex to the priority of the highest priority thread that is currently blocking on the mutex. This inheritance prevents the problem of priority inversion that can occur in such cases. (Note that not all systems support priority inheritance on such mutexes, but it is another feature that becomes possible via the notion of ownership).

If you refer to classic VxWorks RTOS kernel, they define three mechanisms:

• mutex - supports recursion, and optionally priority inheritance. This mechanism is commonly used to protect critical sections of data in a coherent manner.
• binary semaphore - no recursion, no inheritance, simple exclusion, taker and giver does not have to be same thread, broadcast release available. This mechanism can be used to protect critical sections, but is also particularly useful for coherent signalling or synchronization between threads.
• counting semaphore - no recursion or inheritance, acts as a coherent resource counter from any desired initial count, threads only block where net count against the resource is zero.

Again, this varies somewhat by platform - especially what they call these things, but this should be representative of the concepts and various mechanisms at play.

The answer is not efficiency. Non-reentrant mutexes lead to better code.

Example: A::foo() acquires the lock. It then calls B::bar(). This worked fine when you wrote it. But sometime later someone changes B::bar() to call A::baz(), which also acquires the lock.

Well, if you don't have recursive mutexes, this deadlocks. If you do have them, it runs, but it may break. A::foo() may have left the object in an inconsistent state before calling bar(), on the assumption that baz() couldn't get run because it also acquires the mutex. But it probably shouldn't run! The person who wrote A::foo() assumed that nobody could call A::baz() at the same time - that's the entire reason that both of those methods acquired the lock.

The right mental model for using mutexes: The mutex protects an invariant. When the mutex is held, the invariant may change, but before releasing the mutex, the invariant is re-established. Reentrant locks are dangerous because the second time you acquire the lock you can't be sure the invariant is true any more.

If you are happy with reentrant locks, it is only because you have not had to debug a problem like this before. Java has non-reentrant locks these days in java.util.concurrent.locks, by the way.

As written by Dave Butenhof himself:

"The biggest of all the big problems with recursive mutexes is that they encourage you to completely lose track of your locking scheme and scope. This is deadly. Evil. It's the "thread eater". You hold locks for the absolutely shortest possible time. Period. Always. If you're calling something with a lock held simply because you don't know it's held, or because you don't know whether the callee needs the mutex, then you're holding it too long. You're aiming a shotgun at your application and pulling the trigger. You presumably started using threads to get concurrency; but you've just PREVENTED concurrency."