Transactional Memory Should Be an Implementation Technique, Not a Programming

Boehm, Hans-J.

HP Development Company

关键词: transactional memory;    locks;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2009-45

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

Transactional memory is often advocated as an easier- to-use replacement or locks that avoids any possibility of deadlock. Recently, as more care has been exercised in precisely specifying its semantics, a number of researchers have observed that probably the most attractive semantics for transactional memory systems is based on "single global lock atomicity", i.e. on the semantics of a single global lock. We argue that this should be taken one step further: The synchronization operations seen by the programmer should really just be locks, possibly with some syntactic sugar for easier programming with a single global lock. Use as a deadlock-free lock replacement does not require any rollback primitive, or any other constructs that expose properties of the implementation. And it appears that such extensions add considerable complexity.