Leakage at Atomic Producer

Narrowly Avoided

The atomic-powered producer on the sixth floor was suspended last Friday night to avert what seemed an imminent catastrophe. The operators on duty that night were executing a routine evaluation of the producer's control-flow, when, at 23h43, the pipe operator unexpectedly short-circuited. The hapless producer branched uncontrollably, but the administrator suspended the operation before it could leak any of its atomicity. "[The producer's] control-flow looked like it was going to propagate a multi-level exit without freeing its dynamically allocated locks." said the administrator. While such an exceptional occurrence would have been dangerous on its own, it would have been compounded by the fact that this time it almost happened inside the producer's critical section.

If it weren't for the administrator's quick computation in suspending the producer, the multi-level exit from the critical section would almost certainly have caused a leakage of atomicity. A leakage of this magnitude could have caused the proliferation of mutexes throughout the area.

Despite the programmer's best efforts, the producer was not fixed and resumed in time to avoid a buffer underflow. The benches in the C&D were filled with starving consumers. "I've been blocking here since 11 this morning," commented one consumer, who declined to give his name, "the hard part is that we can't do anything else until we get our items." Some of the other consumers, however, were able to fill the monotony with activities such as "spinning" and "busy waiting." One group of consumers even invented a game that they called "baton passing." "We've been passing the baton around for hours," said one such consumer. Another commented that it wasn't as great as it looked, because the baton was "only imaginary." Two consumers decided to pass the time by racing each other, but their inappropriate activities were halted before it could corrupt the queue.

After the near-incident, many mathies were shocked to learn that an atomic-powered producer was operating in such close proximity to their lectures. "Those things are so dangerous, we should replace them all with windmills," said one mathie. Another suggested that the University moved its producer off-site, and connect it to campus using an unbounded buffer. "It's the latest and best technology available," she explained. A spokesperson for the administration said that finances at this time are insufficient for an upgrade of the University's existing fixed-size queues and buffers.

Peiran