以下摘自The Little Book of Semaphores：
A semaphore is like an integer, with three differences:
1. When you create the semaphore, you can initialize its value to any integer, but after that the only operations you are allowed to perform are increment (increase by one) and decrement (decrease by one). You cannot read the current value of the semaphore.
2. When a thread decrements the semaphore, if the result is negative, the thread blocks itself and cannot continue until another thread increments the semaphore.
3. When a thread increments the semaphore, if there are other threads waiting, one of the waiting threads gets unblocked.
To say that a thread blocks itself (or simply “blocks”) is to say that it notifies the scheduler that it cannot proceed. The scheduler will prevent the thread from running until an event occurs that causes the thread to become unblocked. In the tradition of mixed metaphors in computer science, unblocking is often called “waking”.
That’s all there is to the definition, but there are some consequences of the definition you might want to think about.
• In general, there is no way to know before a thread decrements a semaphore whether it will block or not (in specific cases you might be able to prove that it will or will not).
• After a thread increments a semaphore and another thread gets woken up, both threads continue running concurrently. There is no way to know which thread, if either, will continue immediately.
• When you signal a semaphore, you don’t necessarily know whether another thread is waiting, so the number of unblocked threads may be zero or one.
Finally, you might want to think about what the value of the semaphore means. If the value is positive, then it represents the number of threads that can decrement without blocking. If it is negative, then it represents the number of threads that have blocked and are waiting. If the value is zero, it means there are no threads waiting, but if a thread tries to decrement, it will block.
semaphore的初始值为1，通常就用来构建mutex。