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A fine-grained solution to the mutual exclusion problem

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Abstract

We present a “fine-grained” solution to the mutual exclusion problem. A program isfine-grained if it uses only single-reader, single-writer boolean variables and if each of its atomic operations has at most one occurrence of at most one shared variable. In contrast to other fine-grained solutions that have appeared in the literature, processes in our solution do not bysy-wait, but wait on one another only by executingawait statements. Such statements can be implemented in practice either by means of context switching or by means of “local” spinning. We show that our algorithm is correct even if shared variables are accessed nonatomically.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Maryland at College Park, 20742-3255, College Park, MD, USA

    James H. Anderson

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  1. James H. Anderson
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Work supported, in part, by NSF Contract CCR 9109497 and by the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences

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Anderson, J.H. A fine-grained solution to the mutual exclusion problem. Acta Informatica 30, 249–265 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01179373

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01179373

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