A fast mutual exclusion algorithm
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
The portable common runtime approach to interoperability
SOSP '89 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Fast mutual exclusion for uniprocessors
ASPLOS V Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Bounds on shared memory for mutual exclusion
Information and Computation
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We describe an approach for implementing higher-level mutual-exclusion constructs using Lamport's algorithm. A straightforward implementation of, for example, monitor locks based on Lamport's algorithm requires O(n) space per monitor lock if there are n processes that may share the lock. It has occasionally been claimed that this makes the algorithm undesirable in practice. The insight presented here is that we only need a (small) constant amount of space per lock, plus O(n) space shared by all locks in the system. For some common applications, this adds no memory references to the implementation of the algorithm. Fully general spin-lock acquisition and release can usually be implemented with the addition of one memory reference to Lamport's algorithm. On particularly unfavorable hardware, three additional memory references may be required in the contention-free case.