Abstract
Wait-freedom is the strongest and most desirable progress guarantee, under which any thread must make progress when given enough CPU steps. Wait-freedom is required for hard real-time, and desirable in many other scenarios. However, because wait-freedom is hard to achieve, we usually settle for the weaker lock-free progress guarantee, under which one of the active threads is guaranteed to make progress. With lock-freedom (and unlike wait-freedom), starvation of all threads but one is possible.
The linked-list data structure is fundamental and ubiquitous. Lock-free versions of the linked-list are well known. However, whether it is possible to design a practical wait-free linked-list has remained an open question. In this work we present a practical wait-free linked-list based on the CAS primitive. To improve performance further, we also extend this design using the fast-path-slow-path methodology. The proposed design has been implemented and measurements demonstrate performance competitive with that of Harris’s lock-free list, while still providing the desirable wait-free guarantee, required for real-time systems.
This work was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation grant No. 283/10.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chuong, P., Ellen, F., Ramachandran, V.: A universal construction for wait-free transaction friendly data structures. In: SPAA, pp. 335–344 (2010)
Fatourou, P., Kallimanis, N.D.: A highly-efficient wait-free universal construction. In: SPAA, pp. 325–334 (2011)
Fomitchev, M., Ruppert, E.: Lock-free linked lists and skip lists. In: PODC, pp. 50–59. ACM, New York (2004)
Harris, T.L.: A Pragmatic Implementation of Non-blocking Linked-Lists. In: Welch, J.L. (ed.) DISC 2001. LNCS, vol. 2180, pp. 300–314. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Herlihy, M.: A methodology for implementing highly concurrent objects. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 15(5), 745–770 (1993)
Herlihy, M., Shavit, N.: The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufmann (2008)
Kogan, A., Petrank, E.: Wait-free queues with multiple enqueuers and dequeuers. In: PPOPP, pp. 223–234 (2011)
Kogan, A., Petrank, E.: A methodology for creating fast wait-free data structures. In: PPOPP, pp. 141–150 (2012)
Michael, M.M.: Hazard pointers: Safe memory reclamation for lock-free objects. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 15(6), 491–504 (2004)
Timnat, S., Braginsky, A., Kogan, A., Petrank, E.: Wait-free linked-lists. In: PPOPP, pp. 309–310 (2012)
Timnat, S., Braginsky, A., Kogan, A., Petrank, E.: Wait-free linked-lists (2012), http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/%7eerez/%50apers/wfll-full.pdf
Valois, J.D.: Lock-free linked lists using compare-and-swap. In: PODC, pp. 214–222. ACM, New York (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Timnat, S., Braginsky, A., Kogan, A., Petrank, E. (2012). Wait-Free Linked-Lists. In: Baldoni, R., Flocchini, P., Binoy, R. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7702. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35476-2_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35476-2_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35475-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35476-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)