One-sided Mutual Exclusion A new Approach to Mutual Exclusion Primitives

Todays operating systems are designed to manage multiple processes within uniprocessor systems, within several processors and even within distributed computer systems. Fundamental to this design is concurrency, especially mutual exclusion of multiple processes. All mutual exclusion techniques so far are designed to bother all involved processes. The first part of this paper shows an overview of the most common existing techniques that solves this problem. A new approach with a completely different design technique will be discussed afterwards. It is not always necessary to involve all processes and still maintain mutual exclusion. A couple of implementations for different operating systems and user/kernel mode applications will be compared to existing techniques.