5
The Relative Power of Primitive Synchronization Operations
Imagine you are in charge of designing a new multiprocessor. What kinds of atomic instructions should you include? The literature includes a bewildering array of different choices: reading and writing to memory, getAndDecrement(), swap(), getAndComplement(), compareAndSet(), and many, many others. Supporting them all would be complicated and inefficient, but supporting the wrong ones could make it difficult or even impossible to solve important synchronization problems.
Our goal is to identify a set of primitive synchronization operations powerful enough to solve synchronization problems likely to arise in practice. (Of course, we might want to support other, nonessential synchronization ...
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