Indulgent algorithms (preliminary version)

Informally, an <italic>indulgent</italic> algorithm is a distributed algorithm that tolerates <italic>unreliable</italic> failure detection: the algorithm is <italic>indulgent</italic> towards its failure detector. This paper formally characterises such algorithms and states some of their interesting features. We show that indulgent algorithms are inherently <italic>safe</italic> and <italic>uniform</italic>. We also state impossibility results for indulgent solutions to <italic>divergent</italic> problems like consensus, and <italic>failure-sensitive</italic> problems like non-blocking atomic commit and terminating reliable broadcast.