master-degree-notes/Concurrent Systems/notes/7- MUTEX-free concurrency.md

Critical sections (locks) have drawbacks:

• if not put at the right level of granularity, they unnecessarily reduce concurrency
• delays of one process may affect the whole system

MUTEX-freedom: the only atomicity is the one provided by the primitives themselves (no wrapping of code into CSs) the liveness properties used so far cannot be used anymore, since they rely on CSs. (example: if we have only atomic R/W registers, these are the only atomic things that we have. But we may also have atomic primitives like test&set, compare&swap ecc.).

1. Obstruction freedom: