Round 7: Tossup 3

Description acceptable. Finding false positives when performing actions of this type leads to the ABA problem. Many purpose-built data structures assume hardware support for primitives for these actions like “FAA” and “CAS.” Like database 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 control (-5[1])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, locks and semaphores prevent race conditions arising from improperly performing this type of action, (-5[1])which may lead to segmentation faults. (-5[1])For 10 points, (-5[1])what type of action may (-5[1])involve reading or writing bytes? (10[1])■END■ (10[1])

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Summary