Non-blocking synchronization is a technique that uses special algorithms to avoid threads competing for a shared resource having their execution indefinitely postponed by mutual exclusion.

Good reasons to use it are:

• Locks cannot be acquired in interrupt handlers.
• Priority inversion does not happen if no locks are acquired.

See also

• Deadlock
• Starvation
• Contention
• Synchronization
• Concurrency control
• Pre-emptive multitasking
• Collide-and-back-off protocol
• Lock-free and wait-free algorithms

External links

• Article "Simple, Fast, and Practical Non-Blocking and Blocking Concurrent Queue Algorithms" by Maged M. Michael and Michael L. Scott
• Citations from CiteSeer
• Discussion "Communication between Threads, without blocking"