Few comments:

- As KO write, we might need semaphores also on a remote front-end, in case several programs share the same hardware. So it should work and cm_get_path() should not just exit

- When I wrote the multi-threaded device drivers, I did use semaphores instead of mutexes, but I forgot why. Might be that midas semaphores have a timeout and mutexes not, or 
something along those lines.

- I do need either semaphores or mutexes since in a multi-threaded slow-control font-end (too many dashes...) several threads have to access an internal data exchange buffer, which 
needs protection for multi-threaded environments.

So we can how either fix cm_get_path() or replace all semaphores in with mutexes in midas/src/device_driver.cxx. I have kind of a feeling that we should do both. And what about 
switching to c++ std::mutex instead of pthread mutexes?

Stefan