A new fast-path mechanism for mutual exclusion

Summary. Several years ago, Yang and Anderson presented an N-process algorithm for mutual exclusion under read/write atomicity that has $\Theta(\log N)$ time complexity, where “time” is measured by counting remote memory references. In this algorithm, instances of a two-process mutual exclusion algorithm are embedded within a binary arbitration tree. In the two-process algorithm that was used, all busy-waiting is done by “local spinning.” Performance studies presented by Yang and Anderson showed that their N-process algorithm exhibits scalable performance under heavy contention. One drawback of using an arbitration tree, however, is that each process is required to perform $\Theta(\log N)$ remote memory operations even when there is no contention. To remedy this problem, Yang and Anderson presented a variant of their algorithm that includes a “fast-path” mechanism that allows the arbitration tree to be bypassed in the absence of contention. This algorithm has the desirable property that contention-free time complexity is O(1). Unfortunately, the fast-path mechanism that was used caused time complexity under contention to rise to $\Theta(N)$ in the worst case. To this day, the problem of designing a read/write mutual exclusion algorithm with O(1) time complexity in the absence of contention and O(logN) time complexity under contention has remained open. In this paper, we close this problem by presenting a fast-path mechanism that achieves these time complexity bounds when used in conjunction with Yang and Anderson's arbitration-tree algorithm.