VBR: Version Based Reclamation

Authors Gali Sheffi, Maurice Herlihy, Erez Petrank



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Author Details

Gali Sheffi
  • Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel
Maurice Herlihy
  • Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Erez Petrank
  • Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel

Cite AsGet BibTex

Gali Sheffi, Maurice Herlihy, and Erez Petrank. VBR: Version Based Reclamation. In 35th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 209, pp. 35:1-35:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2021.35

Abstract

Safe lock-free memory reclamation is a difficult problem. Existing solutions follow three basic methods (or their combinations): epoch based reclamation, hazard pointers, and optimistic reclamation. Epoch-based methods are fast, but do not guarantee lock-freedom. Hazard pointer solutions are lock-free but typically do not provide high performance. Optimistic methods are lock-free and fast, but previous optimistic methods did not go all the way. While reads were executed optimistically, writes were protected by hazard pointers. In this work we present a new reclamation scheme called version based reclamation (VBR), which provides a full optimistic solution to lock-free memory reclamation, obtaining lock-freedom and high efficiency. Speculative execution is known as a fundamental tool for improving performance in various areas of computer science, and indeed evaluation with a lock-free linked-list, hash-table and skip-list shows that VBR outperforms state-of-the-art existing solutions.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming languages
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming structures
  • Theory of computation → Parallel computing models
  • Theory of computation → Concurrent algorithms
  • Software and its engineering → Garbage collection
  • Software and its engineering → Multithreading
Keywords
  • Safe memory reclamation
  • concurrency
  • linearizability
  • lock-freedom

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