Chapter 11 - Wait-Free Computability for General Tasks

Abstract

Although many tasks of interest are colorless, there are “inherently colored” tasks that cannot be defined without taking process names into account. Some have wait-free read-write protocols, and some do not. This chapter gives a characterization of wait-free read-write solvability for general tasks. We will see that general tasks are harder to analyze than colorless tasks. Allowing tasks to depend on process names seems like a minor change, but it will have sweeping consequences.