An Analysis of I/O And Syscalls In Critical Sections And Their Implications For Transactional Memory

Transactional memory (TM) is a scalable and concurrent way to build atomic sections. One aspect of TM that remains unclear is how side-effecting operations – that is, those which cannot be transparently undone by a TM system – should be handled. This uncertainty poses a significant barrier to the general applicability and acceptance of TM. Further, the absence of transactional workloads makes it difficult to study this aspect In this paper, we characterize the usage of I/O, and in particular system calls, within critical sections in two large applications, exploring both the actions performed and the characteristics of the critical sections in which they are performed. Shared memory programs employing critical sections are the closest approximation available to transactional workloads, so using this characterization, we attempt to reason about how the behavior we observed relates to the previous proposals for handling side-effecting operations within transactions. We find that ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Lee Baugh, Craig B. Zilles
• Keywords: Atomic Sections, Critical Sections, ISPASS 2008, Software Engineering, Transactional Workloads