Event vs Critical Section vs Mutex vs Semaphore [WinCE]

Event	criticalsection	mutex	semaphore
- Notify a thread when to perform its task. - Indicate that an event has occurred. - Threads in other processes can open a handle to an existing event object by specifying its name in a call to CreateEvent.	- When multiple threads have shared access to the same data, the threads can - interfere with one another. - critical section is limited to only one process or DLL and cannot be shared with other processes	- synchronization object whose state is set to signaled when it is not owned by a thread and nonsignaled when it is - Only one thread at a time can own a mutex object. - Threads in other processes can open a handle to an existing mutex object by specifying the object name in a call to CreateMutex.	object's state is set to signaled when its count is greater than zero, and nonsignaled when its count is zero - application uses a semaphore to limit the number of threads using a resource - can be used across processes or within a single process
- To signal an event, use the SetEvent or PulseEvent function. SetEvent does not automatically reset the event object to a nonsignaled state. PulseEvent signals the event, and then resets the event.	- If another thread calls EnterCriticalSection and references the same critical section object, it is blocked until the first thread calls the LeaveCriticalSection function. - create a handle to the critical section object by calling the InitializeCriticalSection function.	- A thread calls the CreateMutex function to create a mutex object. - owning thread releases the mutex object by calling the ReleaseMutex function	CreateSemaphore function to create a named or unnamed semaphore object. - thread calls ReleaseSemaphore to increase the semaphore count by one