MetaTM/TxLinux: transactional memory for an operating system

  • Authors:

  • Hany E. Ramadan;Christopher J. Rossbach;Donald E. Porter;Owen S. Hofmann;Aditya Bhandari;Emmett Witchel

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper quantifies the effect of architectural design decisions onthe performance of TxLinux. TxLinux is a Linux kernel modifiedto use transactions in place of locking primitives in several key subsystems.We run TxLinux on MetaTM, which is a new hardwaretransaction memory (HTM) model.MetaTM contains features that enable efficient and correct interrupthandling for an x86-like architecture. Live stack overwrites can corrupt non-transactional stack memory and requires a smallchange to the transaction register checkpoint hardware to ensurecorrect operation of the operating system. We also propose stack based early release to reduce spurious conflicts on stack memorybetween kernel code and interrupt handlers.We use MetaTM to examine the performance sensitivity of individualarchitectural features. For TxLinux we find that Polka and SizeMatters are effective contention management policies, someform of backoff on transaction contention is vital for performance,and stalling on a transaction conflict reduces transaction restartrates, but does not improve performance. Transaction write setsare small, and performance is insensitive to transaction abort costsbut sensitive to commit costs.