TxLinux and MetaTM: Transactional Memory and the Operating System.

TxLinux is the first operating system to use hardware transactional memory (HTM) as a sychronization primitive, and the first to manage HTM in the scheduler. TxLinux, which is a modification of Linux, is the first real-scale benchmark for transactional memory (TM). MetaTM is a modification of the x8...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Communications of the ACM Vol. 51; no. 9; pp. 83 - 92
Autores principales: Rossbach, Christopher J., Ramadan, Hany E., Hofmann, Owen S., Porter, Donald E., Bhandari, Aditya, Witchel, Emmett
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Association for Computing Machinery Sep2008
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:TxLinux is the first operating system to use hardware transactional memory (HTM) as a sychronization primitive, and the first to manage HTM in the scheduler. TxLinux, which is a modification of Linux, is the first real-scale benchmark for transactional memory (TM). MetaTM is a modification of the x86 architecture that supports HTM in general and TxLinux specifically. This paper describes and measures TxLinux and MetaTM, the HTM model that supports it. TxLinux greatly benefits from a new primitive, called the cooperative transactional spinlock (cxspinlock) that allows locks and transactions to protect the same data while maintaining the advantages of both synchronization primitives. Integrating the TxLinux scheduler with the MetaTM's architectural support for HTM eliminates priority inversion for several real-world benchmarks.