Wait-Free Reference Counting and Memory Management
Paper in proceeding, 2005

We present a practical wait-free implementation of a garbage collection scheme based on reference counting that uses atomic primitives which are available in modern computer systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first wait-free algorithm of a reference counting scheme that can support dynamic concurrent data structures. As all operations of wait-free algorithms are guaranteed to always finish in a finite number of their own steps independently of the other operations actions, the new algorithm is especially suitable for real-time systems where execution time guarantees are of significant importance. We also present a wait-free algorithm of a free-list, for supporting concurrent allocation and freeing of memory blocks. The new algorithms are linearizable and are compatible to previous implementations of non-blocking dynamic data structures.

memory allocation

garbage collection

reference counting

wait-free

shared memory

non-blocking

Author

Håkan Sundell

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computing Science (Chalmers)

IEEE/ACM 19th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2005)

Vol. 2005 1419843
0769523129 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1109/IPDPS.2005.451

ISBN

0769523129

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Latest update

7/12/2024