Efficient nonblocking software transactional memory

Abstract

Foundational transactional memory research grew out of research into nonblocking concurrent data structures, which aim to overcome the many well-known software engineering, performance, and robustness problems associated with lock-based implementations. Recently, many researchers have developed blocking STMs, recognising that they are much easier to design and that the software engineering benefits of STM can be delivered even by a blocking STM. But hiding blocking from the application programmer does not eliminate all of its disadvantages, and in some cases blocking is unacceptable, for example if STM is to be used to coordinate between an interrupt handler and the interrupted thread.