Progress under bounded fairness

Progress is investigated for a shared-memory distributed system with a weak form of fault tolerance that allows processes to stop and restart functioning without notification. The concept of bounded fairness is introduced to formalize bounded delay under the assumption that each family of related processes continuously contains at least one active member. This is a generalization of wait-freedom, and also of a finitary form of weak fairness. Several useful proof rules are stated and proved. In a system with bounded fairness, a wait-free process can be constructed by forming a new process in which processes from the various families are scheduled in a round robin way. The theory is applied to prove progress within bounded delay for a linearizing concurrent data-object in shared memory. The safety properties of this algorithm have been treated elsewhere.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, NL-9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands (e-mail: wim@cs.rug.nl; http://www.cs.rug.nl/˜wim) , , , , , , NL

   Wim H. Hesselink

Received: April 1998 / Accepted: March 1999

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