Hi all,

I'm doing a robot project. In the program, I have two tasks who need to access the same set of variables. To secure synchronization, I use a semaphore to protect the critical section as below code. However, when the two tasks are executing concurrently, it appears one of them always defeats another and "hogs" the semaphore, instead of the expected time-sharing behavior. The two tasks should have the same default priority that I haven't specified. Do you suggest any cause?

The NXT processor is physically only able to do one thing at a time. The FW provides a VM which supports multiple tasks, but still only one can be run at a time (it's probably round-robin). With the NXC/NBC Enhanced Lego FW, the VM executes twenty OP-Codes before moving on (unless the program specifies to move on sooner, using Wait or Yield), and I would assume that the ROBOTC FW VM functions similarly.

Basically that means that it is impossible to make two tasks run at the same time. If you need it to be as close as possible, I suggest combining the two tasks into one, which would give you as the programmer ultimate execution order control, and also reduce VM overhead.