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A spurious wakeup happens when a thread wakes up from waiting on a condition variable that’s been signaled, only to discover that the condition it was waiting for isn’t satisfied.
It’s called spurious because the thread has seemingly been awakened for no reason. But spurious wakeups don’t happen for no reason: they usually happen because, in between the time when the condition variable was signaled and when the waiting thread finally ran, another thread ran and changed the condition. There was a race condition between the threads, with the typical result that sometimes, the thread waking up on the condition variable runs first, winning the race, and sometimes it runs second, losing the race.