Safe memory reclamation for dynamic lock-free objects using atomic reads and writes

• Authors: Maged M. Michael
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-first annual symposium on Principles of distributed computing
• Year: 2002

A major obstacle to the wide use of lock-free data structures, despite their many performance and reliability advantages, is the absence of a practical lock-free method for reclaiming the memory of dynamic nodes removed from dynamic lock-free objects for arbitrary reuse.The only prior lock-free memory reclamation method depends on the DCAS atomic primitive, which is not supported on any current processor architecture. Other memory management methods are blocking, require special operating system support, or do not allow arbitrary memory reuse.This paper presents the first lock-free memory management method for dynamic lock-free objects that allows arbitrary memory reuse, and does not require special operating system or hardware support. It guarantees an upper bound on the number of removed nodes not yet freed at any time, regardless of thread failures and delays. Furthermore, it is wait-free, it is only logarithmically contention-sensitive, and it uses only atomic reads and writes for its operations. In addition, it can be used to prevent the ABA problem for pointers to dynamic nodes in most algorithms, without requiring extra space per pointer or per node.