this seems counter-intuitive since sem_trywait is supposed to just try
once, not wait for the semaphore. however, the retry loop is not a
wait. instead, it's to handle the case where the value changes due to
a simultaneous post or wait from another thread while the semaphore
value remains positive. in such a case, it's absolutely wrong for
sem_trywait to fail with EAGAIN because the semaphore is not busy.