Software Transactional Memory for Multicore Embedded Systems

Embedded systems, like general-purpose systems, can benefit from parallel execution on a symmetric multicore platform. Unfortunately, concurrency issues present in general-purpose programming also apply to embedded systems, protection from which is currently only offered with performance-limiting coarse-grained locking or error-prone and difficult-to-implement fine-grained locking. Transactional memory offers relief from these mechanisms, but has primarily been investigated on general-purpose systems. In this paper, the authors present Embedded Software Transactional Memory (ESTM) as a novel solution to the concurrency problem in parallel embedded applications.