For these enterprise applications to run efficiently on Linux, or on any other operating system, the OS must provide the proper abstractions and services. Usually these enterprise applications and applications suites or software are increasingly built as multi process / multithreaded applications. These application suites are often a collection of multiple independent subsystems. Despite functional variations between these applications often they require to communicate with each other and also sometimes they need to share a common state.

Examples of this are database systems, which typically maintain shared I/O buffers in user space. Access to such shared state must be properly synchronized. Allowing multiple processes to access the same resources in a time sliced manner or potentially consecutively in the case of multiprocessor systems can cause many problems. This is due to the need to maintain data consistency, maintain true temporal dependencies and to ensure that each thread will properly release the resource as required when it has completed its action. Synchronization can be established through locks.

There are mainly two types of locks: - Exclusive locks and shared locks. Exclusive locks are those which allows only a single user to access the protected entity, while shared locks are those which implements the multiple reader – single writer semantics. Synchronization implies a shared state, indicating that a particular resource is available or busy, and a means to wait for its availability. The latter one can either be accomplished through busy-waiting or through an explicit / implicit call to the scheduler.