on the power of locking
We study the expressive power of locking primitives, as measured by ther ability to implement different concurrency control principles. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a concurrency control principle (abstractly, a set of histories) to be implementable by binary semaphores. Also, we characterize exactly those sets of locking primitives that are no more powerful than binary semaphores.
power locking express concurrency control histories semaphores