On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 10:28:33PM +0800, Yubin Ruan wrote: > Hi Paul, > > I writing to ask about implementation of STM (software transactional memory). > > I just finish section 17 of the perfbook, but that doesn't say much about > implementations of transactional memory, especially STM. Basically I > understand the common implementation of HTM (hardware transactional memory) > and have experience using it (thanks to the meltdown paper[1] and the original > HTM paper[2] and some other materials[3]). But I cannot find useful materials > on the topic of STM implementation. I read through the original STM paper[4], > but found it a bit cryptographic (hard to understand). Based on the materials > I read so far, STM can be implemented using lock-free algorithms or simply > locking. Alternatively, it can also be implemented using techniques similar to > those in the database world (write-ahead logging, i.e., journaling). But I > guess a robust and efficient implementation will require more to handle issues > such as I/O ? Can you provide some hints on this topic? > > I am still investigating and will really appreciate any comments. Hello, Yubin, There has been a huge variety of STM implementations over the years. Last I looked into it carefully (admittedly some years back), there was a tradeoff between performance and scalability, but both performance and scalability were quite poor compared to non-TM approaches. A colleague of mine had good things to say about SwissTM, but that was more than five years ago. Michael Spear has done quite a bit of more recent STM work, so looking at his publications would be helpful. Please let me know how it goes! Thanx, Paul > Yubin > > [1]: https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf > (The meltdown paper) > > [2]: http://cs.brown.edu/~mph/HerlihyM93/herlihy93transactional.pdf > (Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures) > > [3]: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/~jones/CS4021/transactional%20memory.pdf > (A lecture note on Intel TSX, which also talk about implementation of HTM) > > [4]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/846e/87f6c8b9d8909d678b5c668cfe46cf40a348.pdf > (Software Transactional Memory) > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe perfbook" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
