ByteSTM: Virtual Machine-level Java Software Transactional Memory

We present ByteSTM, a virtual machine-level Java STM imple-mentation that is built by extending the Jikes RVM. ByteSTM implements two STM algorithms, TL2 and RingSTM. We mod-ify Jikes RVM’s Optimizing compiler to transparently support im-plicit transactions. Being implemented at the VM-level, it accesses memory directly and handles memory uniformly, and avoids Java garbage collection by manually managing memory for transac-tional metadata. Our experimental studies reveal throughput im-provement over other non-VM STMs in the range of 7%–66 % on micro-benchmarks and 7%–76 % on macro-benchmarks