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Abortable Reader-Writer Locks Are No More Complex Than Abortable Mutex Locks

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 7611)

Abstract

When a process attempts to acquire a mutex lock, it may be forced to wait if another process currently holds the lock. In certain applications, such as real-time operating systems and databases, indefinite waiting can cause a process to miss an important deadline [19]. Hence, there has been research on designing abortable mutual exclusion locks, and fairly efficient algorithms of O(logn) RMR complexity have been discovered [11,14] (n denotes the number of processes for which the algorithm is designed).

The abort feature is just as important for a reader-writer lock as it is for a mutual exclusion lock, but to the best of our knowledge there are currently no abortable reader-writer locks that are starvation-free. We show the surprising result that any abortable, starvation-free mutual exclusion algorithm of RMR complexity t(n) can be transformed into an abortable, starvation-free reader-writer exclusion algorithm of RMR complexity O(t(n)). Thus, we obtain the first abortable, starvation-free reader-writer exclusion algorithm of O(logn) RMR complexity. Our results apply to the Cache-Coherent (CC) model of multiprocessors.

Keywords

  • concurrent algorithm
  • synchronization
  • reader-writer exclusion
  • mutual exclusion
  • abortability
  • RMR complexity
  • shared memory algorithm

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Jayanti, P., Liu, Z. (2012). Abortable Reader-Writer Locks Are No More Complex Than Abortable Mutex Locks. In: Aguilera, M.K. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33651-5_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33651-5_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33650-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33651-5

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