Why Transactional Memory Should Not Be Obstruction-Free

@article{Kuznetsov2015WhyTM,
  title={Why Transactional Memory Should Not Be Obstruction-Free},
  author={Petr Kuznetsov and Srivatsan Ravi},
  journal={CoRR},
  year={2015},
  volume={abs/1502.02725}
}

• Petr Kuznetsov, Srivatsan Ravi
• Published in ArXiv 2015

Transactional memory (TM) is an inherently optimistic abstraction: it allows concurrent processes to execute sequences of shared-data accesses (transactions) speculatively, with an option of aborting them in the future. Early TM designs avoided using locks and relied on non-blocking synchronization to ensure obstruction-freedom: a transaction that encounters no step contention is not allowed to abort. However, it was later observed that obstructionfree TMs perform poorly and, as a result, state… CONTINUE READING

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