AFAIK, the only difference between "semaphore of 1" and "mutex" is that a semaphore is definitely able to be signaled by someone who isn't holding a lock, where

AFAIK, the only difference between "semaphore of 1" and "mutex" is that a semaphore is definitely able to be signaled by someone who isn't holding a lock, whereas a mutex is sometimes only able to be signaled/unlocked by whoever acquired the lock. As long as you trust the code running on your machine (if you don't, you have bigger issues to worry about), you'll be fine - nobody signals a semaphore before waiting on it if they're hoping to achieve mutual exclusion