A note on Lamport's mutual exclusion algorithm
Tai-Kuo Woo · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1990
The Lamport's mutual exclusion exclusion algorithm, also known as the bakery algorithm, is very simple and easy to implement. However, the ticket numbers assigned to the processes wishing to enter the critical section can become indeterminately large. This paper resolves this problem by allowing the ticket numbers to move around a ring of length 2 N , where N is the number of processes. The comparison of two ticket numbers is based the distance between them and their magnitudes.