Tag
mutual-exclusion
- Jul 23, 2026 Fair Lock Queues from Sequential Nodes How a ticket built from a sequential child name turns lock contention into a queue, why each waiter watches only its predecessor, and what a herd costs by comparison. distributed systems
- Sep 18, 2025 Why Locks Across Independent Services Do Not Compose Two lock services with no shared order can each grant a lock that the other believes excludes, and no client-side protocol repairs the missing global order. distributed systems
- Jun 11, 2025 The Lease as a Time-Bounded Grant: Why Expiry Needs No Message How a lease replaces an explicit release with a deadline, why the holder must stop before the server reassigns, and what the gap between the two clocks costs. distributed systems
- May 21, 2025 Priority Inversion and How Bounded It Can Be Why a low-priority task holding a shared lock delays a high-priority one, how inheritance and ceiling protocols change the blocking term, and what each still leaves unbounded. embedded systems
- May 6, 2025 Atomic Read-Modify-Write and the Mutual Exclusion Problem Why a flag plus a check cannot keep two threads out of the same critical section, and what a single indivisible read-modify-write instruction changes about the problem. operating systems
- Jan 28, 2025 Fencing Tokens: Why a Lock Is Advisory Until the Resource Checks It How a monotonic token attached to a grant lets the protected resource reject a stale holder, and why no amount of clock discipline makes the check unnecessary. distributed systems