3 ms·
Glancing at OP, it appears CX itself uses a RW lock. "Several years ago, when Andreia first came up with the idea that we could use a reader-writer lock to ach
by eternalban 7y ago
Glancing at OP, it appears CX itself uses a RW lock.
"Several years ago, when Andreia first came up with the idea that we could use a reader-writer lock to achieve wait-freedom, I though that was crazy, but cool. After joining up forces with Pascal and a lot of work, we were able to turn that into a universal construction, CX."
"- wait-freedom can be achieved with locks"
- chrisseaton 7y agoI guess they must be using the lock in a careful way to avoid any contention, or to distribute people who need the lock across many versions of a data structure. That's wouldn't be the same as a 'simple mutex', would it? Which is absolutely not wait-free (even if I don't understand how the OP is using locks.)
- eternalban 7y agoYour original criticism was that a process would crash while holding a lock. I guess we need to wait for the arxiv to come back and read the paper for the details.
- chrisseaton 7y agoYes - a lock can redirect people trying to acquire it, rather than queueing them. So processes need a lock to access a resource, but there are enough resources for everyone to get their own without waiting, and enough that if a process crashes holding one it doesn't cause anyone else to wait. That's not a 'simple mutex' though.