Abstract
We identify a simple relationship that unifies seemingly unrelated progress conditions ranging from the deadlock-free and starvation-free properties common to lock-based systems, to non-blocking conditions such as obstruction-freedom, lock-freedom, and wait-freedom.
Properties can be classified along two dimensions based on the demands they make on the operating system scheduler. A gap in the classification reveals a new non-blocking progress condition, weaker than obstruction-freedom, which we call clash-freedom.
The classification provides an intuitively-appealing explanation why programmers continue to devise data structures that mix both blocking and non-blocking progress conditions. It also explains why the wait-free property is a natural basis for the consensus hierarchy: a theory of shared-memory computation requires an independent progress condition, not one that makes demands of the operating system scheduler.
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Herlihy, M., Shavit, N. (2011). On the Nature of Progress. In: Fernà ndez Anta, A., Lipari, G., Roy, M. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7109. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_22
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