Non-blocking synchronization - Definition and Overview

Non-blocking synchronization is a technique that uses special algorithms to avoid that the execution of threads competing for a shared resource through mutual exclusion are indefinitely postponed.

Good reasons to use it are:

• Locks cannot be acquired in interrupt handlers.
• Priority inversion does not happen if no locks are acquired.

See also

• Deadlock
• Starvation
• Contention
• Synchronization
• Concurrency control
• Pre-emptive multitasking
• Collide-and-back-off protocol
• Lock-free and wait-free algorithms

External links

• Article "Simple, Fast, and Practical Non-Blocking and Blocking Concurrent Queue Algorithms (http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/michael/podc-1996.pdf)" by Maged M. Michael and Michael L. Scott
• Citations from CiteSeer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cis?q=Fast+and+Practical+Non-Blocking+Concurrent+Synchronization)
• Discussion "Communication between Threads, without blocking (http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.programming.threads&threadm=c2s1qn%24mrj%247%40newsserv.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de)"