Emulations of atomic registers and read-modify-write (RMW) primitives in message-passing systems
A partial answer to the second question:

In the book "Distributed Algorithms" by Nancy A. Lynch (1996) (Section 13.2  "Implementing Read-Modify-Write Atomic Objects in Terms of Read/Write Variables"), we have the following impossibility result:


  Theorem 13.11  There does not exist a shared memory system using read/write shared variables that implements a read-modify-write atomic object and guarantees 1-failure termination.