Opacity of Memory Management in Software Transactional Memory

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new method combining incremental validation and sandboxing to improve memory management opacity in Software Transactional Memory, addressing limitations of existing epoch-based reclamation techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that integrates sandboxing with incremental validation to enhance memory safety and reduce memory consumption in transactional memory systems.

Findings

Improved memory safety through combined validation and sandboxing.

Reduced memory consumption compared to epoch-based reclamation.

Enhanced coverage of memory reclamation outside transactions.

Abstract

Opacity of Transactional Memory is proposed to be established by incremental validation. Quiescence in terms of epoch-based memory reclamation is applied to deal with doomed transactions causing memory access violations. This method unfortunately involves increased memory consumption and does not cover reclamations outside of transactions. This paper introduces a different method which combines incremental validation with elements of sandboxing to solve these issues.