Summary: Implementing Wait­Free Objects on Priority­Based Systems \Lambda
James H. Anderson, Srikanth Ramamurthy, and Rohit Jain
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract
Wait­free objects are often implemented through the use
of a ``helping scheme'', whereby one process ``helps'' one or
more other processes to complete an operation. This paper
presents several new helping schemes that can be generally
applied to efficiently implement a variety of different objects
on priority­based uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems.
Examples of such systems include lock­free multiprocessor
kernels and real­time systems. Our helping schemes reduce
overhead by exploiting the way in which processes are sched­
uled in priority­based systems. We illustrate the use of these
schemes by presenting wait­free implementations of linked
lists and a multi­word compare­and­swap primitive.
1 Introduction
We consider the implementation of wait­free shared objects
on multiprogrammed systems in which processes are sched­
uled for execution based on priority. We assume that pro­

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences