Lock-Free Transactions for Real-Time Systems

On Scalable Synchronization for Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems

“…The design of lock-free, wait-free or obstruction-free data structures is one such approach. The main problem with this approach is that it is limited to a small set of basic data structures, e.g., [17,18,19]. For example, to the best of our knowledge, there is no lock-free implementation of a red-black tree that does not use STM.…”

“…Notable work on transactional memory and lock-free data structures in real-time systems include [29,30,18,31,32]. However, most of these works only consider uni-processor systems (with [32] being a notable exception).…”

“…This is a challenge due to the fact that the retry behavior of STM is antagonistic to predictability. There have been several attempts at providing timing assurances when STM is used in real-time systems or when lock-free data structures are used in real-time systems [29,30,18,31]. These approaches only consider uni-processor systems and use the periodic task arrival model to bound retries.…”

“…Since it is not possible for a process to perform conflicting operations on shared memory, and hence cause the retry of another process, unless it is running, the number of preemptions naturally bounds the number of retries on uni-processors. Given this premise, the analysis performed in [29,30,18,31] bounds the number of retries by bounding the number of times a process can be preempted under different scheduling algorithms. This analysis allows the authors to derive schedulability criteria for different scheduling algorithms based on information about process execution times, execution times of the retried code sections, process periods, etc.…”

Real-Time and Active Databases: A Survey

“…Another approach is to use lock-free objects Anderson et al 1996 which i s a v ariant of optimistic concurrency control. Locking of objects is replaced with retry loops" on objects, and the number of these retry loops can be guaranteed to have an upper bound.…”