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Recoverable mutual exclusion

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Abstract

Mutex locks have traditionally been the most common mechanism for protecting shared data structures in concurrent programs. However, the robustness of such locks against process failures has not been studied thoroughly. The vast majority of mutex algorithms are designed around the assumption that processes are reliable, meaning that a process may not fail while executing the lock acquisition and release code, or while inside the critical section. If such a failure does occur, then the liveness properties of a conventional mutex lock may cease to hold until the application or operating system intervenes by cleaning up the internal structure of the lock. For example, a process that is attempting to acquire an otherwise starvation-free mutex may be blocked forever waiting for a failed process to release the critical section. Adding to the difficulty, if the failed process recovers and attempts to acquire the same mutex again without appropriate cleanup, then the mutex may become corrupted to the point where it loses safety, notably the mutual exclusion property. We address this challenge by formalizing the problem of recoverable mutual exclusion, and proposing several solutions that vary both in their assumptions regarding hardware support for synchronization, and in their efficiency. Compared to known solutions, our algorithms are more robust as they do not restrict where or when a process may crash, and provide stricter guarantees in terms of efficiency, which we define in terms of remote memory references.

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Notes

  1. The term bounded in reference to a piece of code means that there exists a function f of the number of processes N such that the code performs at most f(N) shared memory operations in all executions of the algorithm instantiated for N processes.

  2. As explained later on in the model near the discussion of First-Come-First-Served fairness, we assume that the doorway is well-defined and bounded only in a subset of execution histories that are relevant to our weaker notion of FCFS.

  3. In a practical implementation, the code of and can be packaged in a single procedure for simplicity.

  4. The term cleanup-concurrent defined in the conference version of this paper [20] is analogous to 1-failure-concurrent in this model.

  5. The Bounded Recovery property defined in the conference version of this paper [20] is analogous to 1-BR in this model.

  6. Despite the prevalence of cache-coherent architectures, the DSM model remains important in practice because of its inherent scalability. Intel’s Single-chip Cloud Computer, for example, sacrifices cache-coherence “to simplify the design, reduce power consumption and to encourage the exploration of datacenter distributed memory software models” [26].

  7. The RMR complexity of is unbounded if F does not exist for a given history H.

  8. The “\(\wedge \)” operator at line 94 should be interpreted like&& in C++, meaning that the right operand is evaluated only if the left operand is true.

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Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Peter Buhr, Patrick Lam, and the anonymous referees of PODC’16 and Distributed Computing for detailed feedback and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this work. We are grateful also to Vassos Hadzilacos, Danny Hendler, Prasad Jayanti, Gadi Taubenfeld, and Sam Toueg for stimulating technical discussions.

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  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Wojciech Golab & Aditya Ramaraju

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  1. Wojciech Golab
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  2. Aditya Ramaraju
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Correspondence to Wojciech Golab.

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This research is supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Discovery Grants Program; the Ontario Early Researcher Awards Program; and the Google Faculty Research Awards Program.

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Golab, W., Ramaraju, A. Recoverable mutual exclusion. Distrib. Comput. 32, 535–564 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-019-00364-0

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