Advantages

In semaphores there is no spinning, hence no waste of resources due to no busy waiting. That is because threads intending to access the critical section are queued. And could access the priority section when the are de-queued, which is done by the semaphore implementation itself, hence, unnecessary CPU time is not spent on checking if a condition is satisfied to allow the thread to access the critical section.

Semaphores permit more than one thread to access the critical section, in contrast to alternative solution of synchronization like monitors, which follow the mutual exclusion principle strictly. Hence, semaphores allow flexible resource management.
Finally, semaphores are machine independent, as they are implemented in the machine independent code of the microkernel services.

Disadvantages

Problem 1: Programming using Semaphores makes life harder as utmost care must be taken to ensure Ps and Vs are inserted correspondingly and in the correct order so that mutual exclusion and deadlocks are prevented. In addition, it is difficult to produce a structured layout for a program as the Ps and Vs are scattered all over the place. So the modularity is lost. Semaphores are quite impractical when it comes to large scale use.

Problem 2: Semaphores involve a queue in its implementation. For a FIFO queue, there is a high probability for a priority inversion to take place wherein a high priority process which came a bit later might just have to wait when a low priority one is in the critical section. For example, consider a case when a new smoker joins and is desperate to smoke. What if the agent who handles the distribution of the ingredients follows a FIFO queue (wherein the desperate smoker is last according to FIFO) and chooses the ingredients apt for another smoker who would rather wait some more time for a next puff?