The mutual exclusion problem: partII—statement and solutions
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Algorithms for mutual exclusion
Algorithms for mutual exclusion
Memory access buffering in multiprocessors
ISCA '86 Proceedings of the 13th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The power of processor consistency
SPAA '93 Proceedings of the fifth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on formal methods in software practice
SIAM Journal on Computing
A new solution of Dijkstra's concurrent programming problem
Communications of the ACM
Operating System Concepts
Limitations and capabilities of weak memory consistency systems
Limitations and capabilities of weak memory consistency systems
How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Symmetry in systems of asynchronous processes
SFCS '81 Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Atomic shared register access by asynchronous hardware
SFCS '86 Proceedings of the 27th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Hundreds of impossibility results for distributed computing
Distributed Computing - Papers in celebration of the 20th anniversary of PODC
Tight Bounds for Critical Sections in Processor Consistent Platforms
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Laws of order: expensive synchronization in concurrent algorithms cannot be eliminated
Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
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Most weak memory consistency models are incapable of supporting a solution to mutual exclusion using only read and write operations to shared variables. Processor Consistency-Goodman's version (PC-G) is an exception. Ahamad et al.[1] showed that Peterson's mutual exclusion algorithm is correct for PC-G, but Lamport's bakery algorithm is not. In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the number and type (single- or multi-writer) of variables that a mutual exclusion algorithm must use in order to be correct for PC-G. We show that any such solution for n processes must use at least one multi-writer and n single-writers. This lower bound is tight when n = 2, and is tight when n 2 for solutions that do not provide fairness. We show that Burns' algorithm is an unfair solution for mutual exclusion in PC-G that achieves our bound. However, five other known algorithms that use the same number and type of variables do not guarantee mutual exclusion when the memory consistency model is only PC-G, as opposed to the Sequential Consistency model for which they were designed. A corollary of this investigation is that, in contrast to Sequential Consistency, multi-writers cannot be implemented from single-writers in PC-G.