Scaling address-space operations on Linux with TSX

Concurrent programming is important due to increasing core counts, but scalable concurrency control is difficult and error-prone to implement. Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) addresses this problem by providing hardware support for concurrently executing arbitrary read-modify-write memory transactions. Intel released Transactional Synchronization eXtensions (TSX), a HTM implementation, in select processors to support scalable concurrency control. This thesis contributes a case study in applying TSX to the Linux virtual memory system, which currently serializes address-space operations with a lock. TSX should provide scalability by supporting concurrent address-space operations. Achieving scalability with TSX, however, turned out to be difficult due to transactional aborts. This thesis details how to identify and resolve abort problems, and it describes the necessary modifications to make address-space operations scale in Linux. This thesis also describes a new TLB shootdown algorithm, TxShootDown, which removes TLB shootdown from a transactional critical section while avoiding races due to concurrent address-space operations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Johnson, Christopher Ryan, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• M. Frans Kaashoek.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91032

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/91032