Scaling address-space operations on Linux with TSX
Name
892648963-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
492.85 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
386961f9c6521a698d2f2c8f22da04c4
Author(s)
Johnson, Christopher Ryan, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor(s)
M. Frans Kaashoek.
Date Issued
2014
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
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.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
22
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 55-56).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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