English

An Impossibility Result on Strong Linearizability in Message-Passing Systems

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2021-08-10 v2

Abstract

We prove that in asynchronous message-passing systems where at most one process may crash, there is no lock-free strongly linearizable implementation of a weak object that we call Test-or-Set (ToS). This object allows a single distinguished process to apply the set operation once, and a different distinguished process to apply the test operation also once. Since this weak object can be directly implemented by a single-writer single-reader (SWSR) register (and other common objects such as max-register, snapshot and counter), this result implies that there is no 11-resilient lock-free strongly linearizable implementation of a SWSR register (and of these other objects) in message-passing systems. We also prove that there is no 11-resilient lock-free \emph{write} strongly-linearizable implementation of a 2-writer 1-reader (2W1R) register in asynchronous message-passing systems.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.01651,
  title  = {An Impossibility Result on Strong Linearizability in Message-Passing Systems},
  author = {David Yu Cheng Chan and Vassos Hadzilacos and Xing Hu and Sam Toueg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.01651},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:48:02.365Z