Non-blocking algorithm

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:

• Lock (software engineering)s can not be aquired in interrupt handlers.
• Priority inversion does not happen if no locks are aquired.

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" by Maged M. Michael and Michael L. Scott
• Citations from CiteSeer
• Discussion "Communication between Threads, without blocking"