Relaxed Memory Model Zoo

SC + DJR Transactions (SC+DJR)
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SC + DJR Transactions SC+DJR

2018 · Dongol, Jagadeesan, Riely · theoretical, formal · axiomatic formalism

The SC instance of the unified declarative transactional framework of Dongol, Jagadeesan & Riely (POPL 2018), which adds transactions to a relaxed-memory architecture parametric in the base model (the paper instantiates it at SC, TSO, ARMv8 and PPC/POWER). Following Alglave et al.'s vocabulary it treats relaxed memory as a restricted distributed system with no global real-time clock, and replaces strict serializability with an observation-based 'observable serializability' criterion (a committed-transaction order need only respect the observable coherence and causal orders), admitting flexible STM-style abort. A genuine sibling to the Chong-Sorensen-Wickerson TM cluster with a distinct construction and authorship. The added transactional axioms only constrain transactional events, so on programs with no transactions this instance coincides with SC by construction.

Properties

Property vector author-extrapolated — set only where the model’s definition pins the cell down (unknown cells are omitted); cells citing a specific source are marked.

Reordering sound
  • no Store→Load
  • no Store→Store
  • no Load→Load
  • no Load→Store
Reasoning guarantees
  • yes Coherence
  • yes No undefined behaviour
  • yes In-order execution
  • yes No out-of-thin-air
Atomicity guarantees
  • yes Multicopy atomic

Ordering relationships

Equivalent to
  • Sequential Consistency (SC) — Dongol, Jagadeesan & Riely (POPL 2018) give a transactional framework parametric in the base architecture and instantiate it at SC; its added transactional axioms only constrain transactional events, so on programs with no transactions the SC instance coincides with SC by construction. fragment_restricted: they coincide only on the non-transactional fragment — the framework adds an orthogonal transactional layer with observable-serializability guarantees.

References

  • Brijesh Dongol, Radha Jagadeesan, James Riely. Transactions in Relaxed Memory Architectures. PACMPL 2(POPL), Article 18, 2018. doi:10.1145/3158106