Pragmatic Primitives for Non-blocking Data Structures
Abstract
We define a new set of primitive operations that greatly simplify the implementation of non-blocking data structures in asynchronous shared-memory systems. The new operations operate on a set of Data-records, each of which contains multiple fields. The operations are generalizations of the well-known load-link (LL) and store-conditional (SC) operations called LLX and SCX. The LLX operation takes a snapshot of one Data-record. An SCX operation by a process succeeds only if no Data-record in a specified set has been changed since last performed an LLX on it. If successful, the SCX atomically updates one specific field of a Data-record in the set and prevents any future changes to some specified subset of those Data-records. We provide a provably correct implementation of these new primitives from single-word compare-and-swap. As a simple example, we show how to implement a non-blocking multiset data structure in a straightforward way using LLX and SCX.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.06688,
title = {Pragmatic Primitives for Non-blocking Data Structures},
author = {Trevor Brown and Faith Ellen and Eric Ruppert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.06688},
year = {2017}
}