Round 7: Tossup 3

Description acceptable. Finding false positives when performing actions of this type leads to the ABA problem. Many purpose-built (-5[1])data structures assume hardware support for primitives for these actions like “FAA” and “CAS.” Like database (0[1])actions, multiple actions of this type are grouped together and executed atomically in collections known as “transactions.” A mechanism to ensure the safety of these actions “spins” until a process is allowed to gain (-5[1])control of a (*) “critical region.” The principle of mutual exclusion ensures the safety of these non-database actions but may lead to deadlock. In concurrent systems, (10[1])locks and semaphores prevent race conditions arising from improperly performing this type of action, which may lead to segmentation faults. (10[1])For 10 points, what type of action may involve reading or writing bytes? ■END■ (10[3]0[1])

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