Summary: A Fine­Grained Solution to the Mutual Exclusion
Problem \Lambda
James H. Anderson y
Department of Computer Science
The University of Maryland at College Park
College Park, Maryland 20742­3255
December 1991, Revised August 1992
Abstract
We present a ``fine­grained'' solution to the mutual exclusion problem. A program is fine­
grained if it uses only single­reader, single­writer boolean variables and if each of its atomic
operations has at most one occurrence of at most one shared variable. In contrast to other
fine­grained solutions that have appeared in the literature, processes in our solution do not
busy­wait, but wait on one another only by executing await statements. Such statements can
be implemented in practice either by means of context switching or by means of ``local'' spin­
ning. We show that our algorithm is correct even if shared variables are accessed nonatomically.
Keywords: Busy­waiting, mutual exclusion, nonatomic operations, shared data, synchroniza­
tion primitives.
CR Categories: D.4.1, D.4.2, F.3.1
1 Introduction
The mutual exclusion problem is a paradigm for resolving conflicting accesses to shared resources

Source: Anderson, James - Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences