Dijkstra introduced mutual exclusion for an N -process system as the requirement “that at any moment only one of these N cyclic processes is in its critical section” [1]. This requirement, which we call true mutual exclusion, is still the standard definition of mutual exclusion. Mutual exclusion algorithms for shared-memorymultiprocessors do not guarantee true mutual exclusion. We give a simple...

A family of four mutual exclusion algorithms is presented. Its members vary from a simple three-bit linear wait mutual exclusion to the four-bit first-come firstserved algorithm immune to various faults. The algorithms are based on a scheme similar to the Morris’s solution of the mutual exclusion with three weak semaphores. The presented algorithms compare favorably with equivalent published mu...

The question of what constraints must hold for a predicate to behave as a (partial) function, is key to understanding the behaviour of a logic program. It has been shown how this question can be answered by combining backward analysis, a form of analysis that propagates determinacy requirements against the control flow, with a component for deriving so-called mutual exclusion conditions. The la...

A new method of enforcing mutual exclusion among concurrent processes on uniprocessors running UNIX is presented in this paper. When a process attempts to obtain a lock, no race condition will occur unless the process is preempted. The central idea is that a process can avoid a race condition if preemption is made visible to the process when it is rescheduled. Two possible implementations of th...

Mutual exclusion scheduling is the problem of scheduling unit-time tasks non-preemptively on m processors subject to constraints represented by a graph G, such that tasks represented by adjacent vertices in G must run in disjoint time intervals. This problem arises in load-balancing the parallel solution of partial differential equations by domain decomposition. Minimizing the completion time i...

We propose a new concurrent programming model, Automatic Mutual Exclusion (AME). In contrast to lock-based programming, and to other programming models built over software transactional memory (STM), we arrange that all shared state is implicitly protected unless the programmer explicitly specifies otherwise. An AME program is composed from serializable atomic fragments. We include features all...