A methodology for implementing highly concurrent data structures
PPOPP '90 Proceedings of the second ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles & practice of parallel programming
Reactive synchronization algorithms for multiprocessors
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Evaluating and Optimizing Thread Pool Strategies for Real-Time CORBA
OM '01 Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Optimization of middleware and distributed systems
Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects
Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects
Kqueue - A Generic and Scalable Event Notification Facility
Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
malloc() performance in a multithreaded Linux environment
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
A scalable and explicit event delivery mechanism for UNIX
ATEC '99 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Performance analysis and comparison of interrupt-handling schemes in gigabit networks
Computer Communications
AHAFS subsystem for enhancing operating system health in the cloud computing era
IBM Journal of Research and Development
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Threads in reactive applications need to service a multitude of events from different sources such as device drivers, communication channels or cooperating threads. While notification about these events can conceptually be understood as a form of "synchronization", most operating systems (including Linux) do not provide a unified abstraction. This paper proposes to separate event delivery and notification, and to provide unified event notification through general-purpose synchronization objects. It demonstrates how this unified mechanism can be implemented in Linux as an extension of the futex mechanism to allow notification from kernel-space. Required modifications are discussed and their impact is assessed. The new event notification mechanism allows to move many thread activation policy decisions into user-space, with benefits for multi-threaded reactive applications: This is demonstrated in a modification of the leader/followers pattern with considerable performance benefits.