Tracking in Order to Recover: Detectable Recovery of Lock-Free Data Structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tracking method for creating detectably recoverable lock-free data structures suitable for non-volatile memory systems, ensuring crash recovery without extensive logging.

Contribution

The paper proposes Info-Structure Based (ISB) tracking, a novel technique that enhances lock-free data structures with minimal overhead for detectable recovery.

Findings

Successfully applied to queue, linked list, binary search tree, and exchanger

Reduces recovery overhead compared to full logging methods

Demonstrates feasibility through experimental evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents the tracking approach for deriving detectably recoverable (and thus also durable) implementations of many widely-used concurrent data structures. Such data structures, satisfying detectable recovery, are appealing for emerging systems featuring byte-addressable non-volatile main memory (NVRAM), whose persistence allows to efficiently resurrect failed processes after crashes. Detectable recovery ensures that after a crash, every executed operation is able to recover and return a correct response, and that the state of the data structure is not corrupted. Info-Structure Based (ISB)-tracking amends descriptor objects used in existing lock-free helping schemes with additional fields that track an operation's progress towards completion and persists these fields to memory in order to ensure detectable recovery. ISB-tracking avoids full-fledged logging and tracks the progress of concurrent operations in a per-process manner, thus reducing the cost of ensuring detectable recovery. We have applied ISB-tracking to derive detectably recoverable implementations of a queue, a linked list, a binary search tree, and an exchanger. Experimental results show the feasibility of the technique.

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