English

On Partial Wait-Freedom in Transactional Memory

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2014-08-18 v2

Abstract

Transactional memory (TM) is a convenient synchronization tool that allows concurrent threads to declare sequences of instructions on shared data as speculative \emph{transactions} with "all-or-nothing" semantics. It is known that dynamic transactional memory cannot provide \emph{wait-free} progress in the sense that every transaction commits in a finite number of its own steps. In this paper, we explore the costs of providing wait-freedom to only a \emph{subset} of transactions. Since most transactional workloads are believed to be read-dominated, we require that read-only transactions commit in the wait-free manner, while updating transactions are guaranteed to commit only if they run in the absence of concurrency. We show that this kind of partial wait-freedom, combined with attractive requirements like read invisibility or disjoint-access parallelism, incurs considerable complexity costs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.6876,
  title  = {On Partial Wait-Freedom in Transactional Memory},
  author = {Petr Kuznetsov and Srivatsan Ravi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.6876},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:13:10.730Z