Abstract
Software transactional memory is an effective mechanism to avoid concurrency bugs in multithreaded programs. However, two problems hinder the adoption of such traditional systems in the wild world: high human cost for equipping programs with transaction functionality and low compatibility with I/O calls and conditional variables. This paper presents Convoider to solve these problems. By intercepting interthread operations and designating code among them as transactions in each thread, Convoider automatically transactionalizes target programs without any source code modification and recompiling. By saving/restoring stack frames and CPU registers on beginning/aborting a transaction, Convoider makes execution flow revocable. By turning threads into processes, leveraging virtual memory protection and customizing memory allocation/deallocation, Convoider makes memory manipulations revocable. By maintaining virtual file systems and redirecting I/O operations onto them, Convoider makes I/O effects revocable. By converting lock/unlock operations to no-ops, customizing signal/wait operations on condition variables, and committing memory changes transactionally, Convoider makes deadlocks, data races, and atomicity violations impossible. Experimental results show that Convoider succeeds in transparently transactionalizing twelve real-world applications with averagely incurring only 28% runtime overhead and perfectly avoid 94% of thirty-one concurrency bugs used in our experiments. This study can help efficiently transactionalize legacy multithreaded applications and effectively improve the runtime reliability of them.
Highlights
Grace [11] is the first trial to automatically transactionalize traditional lock-based concurrent programs
Experimental results show that Convoider succeeds in transparently transactionalizing twelve real-world applications with averagely incurring only 28% runtime overhead and perfectly avoid 94% of thirty-one concurrency bugs used in our experiments. is study can help efficiently transactionalize legacy multithreaded applications and effectively improve the runtime reliability of them
This paper presents a new and optimized Software transactional memory (STM) system Convoider, which tries to transparently transactionalize applications without any manual effort, avoid various types of concurrency bugs, and support revocable I/O as well as proper condvar handling simultaneously
Summary
Grace [11] is the first trial to automatically transactionalize traditional lock-based concurrent programs. It turns threads into processes, automatically partitions code into transactions, constructs a transactional memory by leveraging virtual memory protection, and avoids simple concurrency bugs. Dthreads [39] enhances Grace in adding support for proper condvar handling. Conversion [42] advances Dthreads by recreating an efficient virtual memory manager at the kernel level. Comparison between Convoider and Conversion is not made because they are not comparative in both implementation levels (user space level vs kernel level) and usability (a shared library vs an extended kernel)
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