Bringing practical lock-free synchronization to 64-bit applications

  • Authors:
  • Simon Doherty;Maurice Herlihy;Victor Luchangco;Mark Moir

  • Affiliations:
  • Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand;Brown University, Providence, RI;Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA;Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Many lock-free data structures in the literature exploit techniques that are possible only because state-of-the-art 64-bit processors are still running 32-bit operating systems and applications. As software catches up to hardware, "64-bit-clean" lock-free data structures, which cannot use such techniques, are needed.We present several 64-bit-clean lock-free implementations: load-linked/store-conditional variables of arbitrary size, a FIFO queue, and a freelist. In addition to being portable to 64-bit software, our implementations also improve on previous ones in that they are space-adaptive and do not require knowledge of the number of threads that will access them.