Efficient and scalable cross-ISA virtualization of hardware transactional memory

Abstract

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System virtualization is a key enabling technology. However, existing virtualization techniques suffer from a significant limitation due to their limited cross-ISA support for emerging architecture-specific hardware extensions. To address this issue, we make the first attempt at hardware transactional memory (HTM), which has been supported by modern multi-core processors and used by more and more applications to simplify concurrent programming. In particular, we propose an efficient and scalable mechanism to support cross-ISA virtualization of HTMs. The mechanism emulates guest HTMs using host HTMs, and tries to preserve as much as possible the performance and the scalability of guest applications. Experimental results on STAMP benchmarks show that an average of 2.3X and 12.6X performance speedup can be achieved respectively for x86_64 and PowerPC64 guest applications on an x86_64 host machine. Moreover, it can attain similar scalability to the native execution of the applications.