Topics:   Apple   -   Microsoft   -   Linux   -   Unix

Intel's upcoming transactional memory feature

Here is a posting on the Intel software network describing the "transactional synchronization extensions" feature to be found in the future "Haswell" processor.

With transactional synchronization, the hardware can determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections, and perform serialization only when required. This lets the processor expose and exploit concurrency that would otherwise be hidden due to dynamically unnecessary synchronization. At the lowest level with Intel TSX, programmer-specified code regions (also referred to as transactional regions) are executed transactionally. If the transactional execution completes successfully, then all memory operations performed within the transactional region will appear to have occurred instantaneously when viewed from other logical processors. A processor makes architectural updates performed within the region visible to other logical processors only on a successful commit, a process referred to as an atomic commit.

Needless to say, there should be interesting ways to use such a feature in the kernel if it works well, but other projects (PyPy, for example) have also expressed interest in transactional memory.


 

More Stories in Linux Weekly News