Problem Definition
The traditional use of locking to maintain consistency of shared data in concurrent programs has a number of disadvantages related to software engineering, robustness, performance, and scalability. As a result, a great deal of research effort has gone into nonblocking synchronization mechanisms over the last few decades.
Herlihy's seminal paper Wait-Free Synchronization [12] studied the problem of implementing concurrent data structures in a wait-free manner, i. e., so that every operation on the data structure completes in a finite number of steps by the invoking thread, regardless of how fast or slow other threads run and even if some or all of them halt permanently. Implementations based on locks are not wait-free because, while one thread holds a lock, others can take an unbounded number of steps waiting to acquire the lock. Thus, by requiring implementations to be wait-free, some of the disadvantages of locks may potentially be eliminated.
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Moir, M. (2008). Wait-Free Synchronization. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30162-4_472
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