Brief Announcement: Hazard Eras - Non-Blocking Memory Reclamation

Abstract

For non-blocking data-structures, only memory reclamation with pointer-based techniques can maintain non-blocking progress, but there can be high overhead associated to these techniques, with the most notable example being Hazard Pointers. We present a new algorithm we named Hazard Eras, which allows for efficient lock-free or wait-free memory reclamation in concurrent data structures and can be used as drop-in replacement to Hazard Pointers. Results from our microbenchmark show that when applied to a lock-free linked list, Hazard Eras will match the throughput of Hazard Pointers in the worst-case, and can outperform Hazard Pointers by a factor of 5x. Hazard Eras provides the same progress conditions as Hazard Pointers and can equally be implemented with the C11/C++11 memory model and atomics, making it portable across multiple systems.