Forkscan
Name
forkscan-eurosys-17.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
803.86 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4e5342f89ad961057dc008f63c9fa531
Author(s)
Alistarh, Dan
Leiserson, William Mitchell
Matveev, Alexander
Shavit, Nir N.
Alternative Title
Conservative Memory Reclamation for Modern Operating Systems
Date Issued
April 2017
Journal
EuroSys '17: Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Computer Systems
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Alistarh, Dan et al. "Forkscan: Conservative Memory Reclamation for Modern Operating Systems." EuroSys '17: Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Computer Systems, April 2017, Belgrade, Serbia, Association for Computing Machinery, April 2017 © 2017 The Authors
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The problem of efficient concurrent memory reclamation in unmanaged languages such as C or C++ is one of the major challenges facing the parallelization of billions of lines of legacy code. Garbage collectors for C/C++ can be inefficient; thus, programmers are often forced to use finely-crafted concurrent memory reclamation techniques. These techniques can provide good performance, but require considerable programming effort to deploy, and have strict requirements, allowing the programmer very little room for error. In this work, we present Forkscan, a new conservative concurrent memory reclamation scheme which is fully automatic and surprisingly scalable. Forkscan's semantics place it between automatic garbage collectors (it requires the programmer to explicitly retire nodes before they can be reclaimed), and concurrent memory reclamation techniques (as it does not assume that nodes are completely unlinked from the data structure for correctness). Forkscan's implementation exploits these new semantics for efficiency: we leverage parallelism and optimized implementations of signaling and copy-on-write in modern operating systems to efficiently obtain and process consistent snapshots of memory that can be scanned concurrently with the normal program operation. Empirical evaluation on a range of classical concurrent data structure microbenchmarks shows that Forkscan can preserve the scalability of the original code, while maintaining an order of magnitude lower latency than automatic garbage collection, and demonstrating competitive performance with finely crafted memory reclamation techniques.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3064176.3064214
