Abstract
As mentioned before, the concept of mutual exclusion has, ever since the early days of computing, been recognized as a central issue in taming the complexity brought about by multiprograms run on a shared installation. The reason why it became a central issue is that the primitive statements provided by actual machinery often were — and are — far too finegrained to make multiprogramming practically feasible. Thus, the mutual exclusion problem, i.e. the problem of how to build (arbitrary) coarsegrained atomic statements out of finer-grained ones, did become an urgent one. In its canonical form, the problem is:
Given a number of components, each of the form
$$*[ncs;cs] $$synchronize them in such a way that at any moment in time, at most one component is engaged in its cs- fragment.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Feijen, W.H.J., van Gasteren, A.J.M. (1999). Re-inventing a Great Idea. In: On a Method of Multiprogramming. Monographs in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3126-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3126-2_15
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