Binary semaphores vs Thread suspension

[jayalfredprufrock]

I was hoping if somebody could offer some design advice regarding the use case for binary semaphores.

In a situation where you have a hardware interrupt (eg. rx buffer full) and you want to signal to another thread to parse the data packet, is there any advantage of using a binary semaphore instead of simply putting the parsing thread asleep and waking it up from the interrupt? Both seem to work without any noticeable differences but since I do this kind of thing so often I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a reason to use one technique over the other. Thanks!

[Giovanni]

Hi,

Binary Semaphores are larger but there can be multiple threads waiting on them. The suspend pointer can only accommodate one thread waiting.

The difference is also that the semaphore can buffer one event (taken to not taken transition) while the suspend point is synchronous, you have to put it in a critical zone and check a condition externally before going to sleep.

Basically it depends on your requirements, the HAL uses both modes in various drivers.

Giovanni