Safe and Efficient Supervised Memory Systems

Supervised Memory systems use out-of-band metabits to control and monitor accesses to normal data memory for such purposes as transactional memory and memory type state trackers. Previous proposals demonstrate the value of supervised memory systems, but have typically assumed sequential consistency (while most deployed systems use weaker models), and used ad hoc, informal memory specifications (that can be ambiguous and/or incorrect). This paper seeks to make many previous proposals more practical.