In this paper we describe restartable atomic sequences, an optimistic mechanism for implementing simple atomic operations (such as Test-And-Set) on a uniprocessor. A thread that is suspended within a restartable atomic sequence is resumed by the operating system at the beginning of the sequence, rather than at the point of suspension. This guarantees that the thread eventually executes the sequence atomically. A restartable atomic sequence has significantly less overhead than other software-based synchronization mechanisms, such as kernel emulation or software reservation. Consequently, it is an attractive alternative for use on uniprocessors that do no support atomic operations. Even on processors that do support atomic operations in hardware, restartable atomic sequences can have lower overhead.

We've designed and implemented a copying garbage-collection algorithm that is efficient, real-time, concurrent, runs on commercial uniprocessors and shared-memory multiprocessors, and requires no change to compilers. The algorithm uses standard virtual-memory hardware to detect references to “from space” objects and to synchronize the collector and mutator threads. We've implemented and measured a prototype running on SRC's 5-processor Firefly. It will be straightforward to merge our techniques with generational collection. An incremental, non-concurrent version could be implemented easily on many versions of Unix.

Abstract The Yale Tools environment provides integrated modern computing facilities to a mixed group of programmers and users on time‐shared machines. Hundreds of people use the environment every day for systems and applications programming, word‐processing and university business. The success of the environment is in its integration and engineering detail. Building such a system without a high‐level language and a run‐time library would have been impossible.