Automatic memory reclamation for lock-free data structures

Nachshon Cohen, Erez Petrank

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Lock-free data-structures are widely employed in practice, yet designing lock-free memory reclamation for them is notoriously difficult. In particular, all known lock-free reclamation schemes are "manual" in the sense that the developer has to specify when nodes have retired and may be reclaimed. Retiring nodes adequately is non-trivial and often requires the modification of the original lock-free algorithm. In this paper we present an automatic lock-free reclamation scheme for lock-free data-structures in the spirit of a mark-sweep garbage collection. The proposed algorithm works with any normalized lock-free algorithm and with no need for the programmer to retire nodes or make changes to the algorithm. Evaluation of the proposed scheme on a linked-list and a hash table shows that it performs similarly to the best manual (lock-free) memory reclamation scheme.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOOPSLA 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications
EditorsPatrick Eugster, Jonathan Aldrich
Pages260-279
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)9781450336895
DOIs
StatePublished - 23 Oct 2015
Event2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2015 - Pittsburgh, United States
Duration: 25 Oct 201530 Oct 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA
Volume25-30-Oct-2015

Conference

Conference2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPittsburgh
Period25/10/1530/10/15

Keywords

  • Concurrent Data Structures
  • Hazard Pointers
  • Lock-free
  • Memory Management
  • Non-blocking

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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