A Study of Shared-Memory Mutual Exclusion Protocols using CADP

Radu Mateescu and Wendelin Serwe

Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS)'2010 (Antwerp, Belgium)

Abstract:

Mutual exclusion protocols are an essential building block of concurrent systems: indeed, such a protocol is required whenever a shared resource has to be protected against concurrent non-atomic accesses. Hence, many variants of mutual exclusion protocols exist in the shared-memory setting, such as Peterson's or Dekker's well-known protocols. Although the functional correctness of these protocols has been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to their nonfunctional aspects, such as their performance in the long run. In this paper, we report on experiments with the performance evaluation of mutual exclusion protocols using Interactive Markov Chains. Steady-state analysis provides an additional criterion for comparing protocols, which complements the verification of their functional properties. We also carefully re-examined the functional properties, whose accurate formulation as temporal logic formulas in the action-based setting turns out to be quite involved.

18 pages

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Slides of W. Serwe's lecture at FMICS'10:

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