I am developing a multi-threaded network application focused on packet processing that involves sender and receiver threads. This application runs on a single-core CPU, which adds complexity to how threading is managed. To ensure that other threads do not access and send the same packet before the receiving thread signals completion (via a semaphore), I acquire a mutex lock in the sender thread. The process includes locking the mutex, setting packet->request = 1, calling the send(packet) function, waiting for the semaphore post, and finally unlocking the mutex to return packet->result.