Abstract
Wait-freedom is the strongest and most desirable progress guarantee, under which any thread must make progress when given enough CPU steps. Wait-freedom is required for hard real-time, and desirable in many other scenarios. However, because wait-freedom is hard to achieve, we usually settle for the weaker lock-free progress guarantee, under which one of the active threads is guaranteed to make progress. With lock-freedom (and unlike wait-freedom), starvation of all threads but one is possible.
The linked-list data structure is fundamental and ubiquitous. Lock-free versions of the linked-list are well known. However, whether it is possible to design a practical wait-free linked-list has remained an open question. In this work we present a practical wait-free linked-list based on the CAS primitive. To improve performance further, we also extend this design using the fast-path-slow-path methodology. The proposed design has been implemented and measurements demonstrate performance competitive with that of Harris’s lock-free list, while still providing the desirable wait-free guarantee, required for real-time systems.
This work was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation grant No. 283/10.
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Timnat, S., Braginsky, A., Kogan, A., Petrank, E. (2012). Wait-Free Linked-Lists. In: Baldoni, R., Flocchini, P., Binoy, R. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7702. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35476-2_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35476-2_23
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