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Locks, leases, fencing tokens, FizzBee

FizzBee is a new formal specification language, originally announced back in May of last year. FizzBee’s author, Jayaprabhakar (JP) Kadarkarai, reached out to me recently and asked me what I …

Mutual exclusion algorithms are a classic use case for formal modeling, but here’s some additional background motivation: a few years back, there was an online dust-up between Martin Kleppmann(author of the excellent book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, commonly referred to as DDIA) and Salvatore Sanfilippo(creator of Redis, and better known by his online handle antirez). Kleppmann noted this problem with Redlock, that it was vulnerable to issues where a process’s execution could pause for some period of time (e.g., due to garbage collection). I was a little bit confused by FizzBee’s default behavior of a thread being able to crash at any arbitrary point, but that’s configurable, and I was able to use it to good effect to show deadlock in the lock model above.

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