Abstract

Several hybrid transactional memory (HyTM) schemes have recently been proposed to complement the fast, but best-effort nature of hardware transactional memory with a slow, reliable software backup. However, the costs of providing concurrency between hardware and software transactions in HyTM are still not well understood. In this paper, we propose a general model for HyTM implementations, which captures the ability of hardware transactions to buffer memory accesses. The model allows us to formally quantify and analyze the amount of overhead (instrumentation) caused by the potential presence of software transactions. We prove that (1) it is impossible to build a strictly serializable HyTM implementation that has both uninstrumented reads and writes, even for very weak progress guarantees, and (2) the instrumentation cost incurred by a hardware transaction in any progressive opaque HyTM is …

Date

2018

Authors

Dan Alistarh, Justin Kopinsky, Petr Kuznetsov, Srivatsan Ravi, Nir Shavit

Journal

Distributed Computing

Volume

31

Pages

167-185

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg