A Transactional Memory in an Extensible Operating System

This paper describes Rhino, a transactional memory service implemented on top of the SPIN operating system. Rhino is implemented as an extension that runs in SPIN kernel's address space. We discuss how the extension structure of Rhino can solve performance problems previously unavoidable in traditional systems, and we quantify its benefits. We also introduce three alternative buffer management schemes and study their performance under various workloads.