An Adaptive Approach to Recoverable Mutual Exclusion

Mutual exclusion (ME) is one of the most commonly used techniques to handle conflicts in concurrent systems. Traditionally, mutual exclusion algorithms have been designed under the assumption that a process does not fail while acquiring/releasing a lock or while executing its critical section. However, failures do occur in real life, potentially leaving the lock in an inconsistent state. This gives rise to the problem of recoverable mutual exclusion (RME) that involves designing a mutual exclusion algorithm that can tolerate failures, while maintaining safety and liveness properties.