Classical state-machine replication protocols, such as Paxos, rely on a distinguished leader process to order commands. Unfortunately, this approach makes the leader a single point of failure and increases the latency for clients that are not co-located with it. As a response to these drawbacks, Egalitarian Paxos [Iulian Moraru et al., 2013] introduced an alternative, leaderless approach, that allows replicas to order commands collaboratively. Not relying on a single leader allows the protocol to maintain non-zero throughput with up to f crashes of any processes out of a total of n = 2f+1. The protocol furthermore allows any process to execute a command c fast, in 2 message delays, provided no more than e = ⌈(f+1)/2⌉ other processes fail, and all concurrently submitted commands commute with c; the latter condition is often satisfied in practical systems. Egalitarian Paxos has served as a foundation for many other replication protocols. But unfortunately, the protocol is very complex, ambiguously specified and suffers from nontrivial bugs. In this paper, we present EPaxos* - a simpler and correct variant of Egalitarian Paxos. Our key technical contribution is a simpler failure-recovery algorithm, which we have rigorously proved correct. Our protocol also generalizes Egalitarian Paxos to cover the whole spectrum of failure thresholds f and e such that n ≥ max{2e+f-1, 2f+1} - the number of processes that we show to be optimal.

Communication channel failures are a major concern for the developers of modern fault-tolerant systems. However, while tight bounds for process failures are well-established, extending them to include channel failures has remained an open problem. We introduce generalized quorum systems -- a framework that characterizes the necessary and sufficient conditions for implementing atomic registers, atomic snapshots, lattice agreement and consensus under arbitrary patterns of process-channel failures. Generalized quorum systems relax the connectivity constraints of classical quorum systems: instead of requiring bidirectional reachability for every pair of write and read quorums, they only require some write quorum to be unidirectionally reachable from some read quorum. This weak connectivity makes implementing registers particularly challenging, because it precludes the traditional request/response pattern of quorum access, making classical solutions like ABD inapplicable. To address this, we introduce novel logical clocks that allow write and read quorums to reliably track state updates without relying on bidirectional connectivity.

A seminal result by Lamport shows that at least max{2e + f + 1, 2f + 1} processes are required to implement partially synchronous consensus that tolerates f process failures and can furthermore decide in two message delays under f failures. This lower bound is matched by the classical Fast Paxos protocol. However, more recent practical protocols, such as Egalitarian Paxos, provide two-step decisions with fewer processes, seemingly contradicting the lower bound. We show that this discrepancy arises because the classical bound requires two-step decisions under a wide range of scenarios, not all of which are relevant in practice. We propose a more pragmatic condition for which we establish tight bounds on the number of processes required. Interestingly, these bounds depend on whether consensus is implemented as an atomic object or a decision task. For consensus as an object, max{2e + f - 1, 2f + 1} processes are necessary and sufficient for two-step decisions, while for a task the tight bound is max{2e + f, 2f + 1}.

We introduce Distributed Memory Automata, a model of register automata suitable to capture some features of distributed algorithms designed for shared-memory systems. In this model, each participant owns a local register and a shared register and has the ability to change its local value, to write it in the global memory and to test atomically the number of occurrences of its value in the shared memory, up to some threshold. We show that the control-state reachability problem for Distributed Memory Automata is Pspace-complete for a fixed number of participants and is in Pspace when the number of participants is not fixed a priori.