There is one more way that is truly lock free. Most lock free implementations relying on atomic compare and swap instructions are not lock free afaik; they have a lock on the cache line in the CPU (in a way you go away from global lock to many distributed locks).
There is one more mechanism that allows implementing ring buffers without having to compare head and tail buffers at all (and doesn’t rely on counters or empty/full flags etc) that piggybacks on the cache consistency protocol
There is one more mechanism that allows implementing ring buffers without having to compare head and tail buffers at all (and doesn’t rely on counters or empty/full flags etc) that piggybacks on the cache consistency protocol