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Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 22:28:33 +0800
From: Yubin Ruan <ablacktshirt@gmail.com>
Subject: STM implementation
Message-ID: <20180115142809.GA28308@HP>
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To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: perfbook@vger.kernel.org
List-ID: <perfbook.vger.kernel.org>

Hi Paul,

I writing to ask about implementation of STM (software transactional memory).

I just finish section 17 of the perfbook, but that doesn't say much about
implementations of transactional memory, especially STM. Basically I
understand the common implementation of HTM (hardware transactional memory)
and have experience using it (thanks to the meltdown paper[1] and the original
HTM paper[2] and some other materials[3]). But I cannot find useful materials
on the topic of STM implementation. I read through the original STM paper[4],
but found it a bit cryptographic (hard to understand). Based on the materials
I read so far, STM can be implemented using lock-free algorithms or simply
locking. Alternatively, it can also be implemented using techniques similar to
those in the database world (write-ahead logging, i.e., journaling). But I
guess a robust and efficient implementation will require more to handle issues
such as I/O ? Can you provide some hints on this topic?

I am still investigating and will really appreciate any comments.

        Yubin

[1]: https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf
    (The meltdown paper)

[2]: http://cs.brown.edu/~mph/HerlihyM93/herlihy93transactional.pdf
    (Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures)

[3]: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/~jones/CS4021/transactional%20memory.pdf
    (A lecture note on Intel TSX, which also talk about implementation of HTM)

[4]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/846e/87f6c8b9d8909d678b5c668cfe46cf40a348.pdf
    (Software Transactional Memory)