[chrisseaton]

‘Lock-free’ means the application cannot ‘lock up’, rather than there are no locks. CAS does use a kind of hardware-level lock in the cache, but can never cause any application to lock up because there is no per-process state like in a software lock.

[md5person]

Yes, that aligns more closely with my mental model of a "lock-free algorithm", but what I see in practicality is people avoiding (or re-inventing) synchronization primitives, thinking that they don't belong in a "lock-free algorithm".

You can still use standard kernel-provided synchronization objects (mutex/events/semaphores) in your "lock-free applications", as long as you provide timeouts to blocking wait() calls, and handle abandoned objects gracefully.