master-degree-notes/Concurrent Systems/notes/Lezione2.md

Peterson's algorithm cost O(n^2) A first way to reduce this cost is by using a tournament of MUTEX between pairs of processes: !Pasted image 20250304082459.png

Of course this is a binary tree, and the height of a binary tree is logaritmic to the number of leaves. A process then wins after \lceil \log_{2}n \rceil competitions \to O(\log n) cost.

But we can do better. Let's see an idea of a constant-time algorithm.

Initialize Y at ⊥, X at any value (e.g., 0)

lock(i) :=
	x <- i
	if Y != ⊥ then FAIL
	else Y <- i
	if X = i then return
	else FAIL

 unlock(i) :=
	 Y <- ⊥
	 return

Problems:

• we don't want the FAIL
• it is possible to have an execution where nobody accesses its CS, if repeated forever it entails a deadlock