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 (-5[1])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 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 (-5[2])arising from improperly performing this type of action, which may lead to segmentation faults. For 10 points, what type of action may involve reading or writing bytes? ■END■ (10[2]0[3])

Back to tossups

Buzzes

Summary