A runtime system for software lock elision
Amitabha Roy, Steven J. Hand, Tim Harris · 2009
The advent of multi-core processors means that exploiting parallelism is key to increasing the performance of programs. Many researchers have studied the use of atomic blocks as a way to simplify the construction of scalable parallel programs. However, there is a large body of existing lock-based code, and typically it is incorrect to simply replace lock-based critical sections with atomic blocks. Some problems include the need to do IO within critical sections; the use of primitives such as condition variables; and the sometime reliance on underlying lock properties such as fairness or priority inheritance.