Linearizability with Ownership Transfer

Abstract. Linearizability is a commonly accepted notion of correctness for li-braries of concurrent algorithms. Unfortunately, it assumes a complete isolation between a library and its client, with interactions limited to passing values of a given data type. This is inappropriate for common programming languages, where libraries and their clients can communicate via the heap, transferring the ownership of data structures, and can even run in a shared address space with-out any memory protection. In this paper, we present the first definition of lin-earizability that lifts this limitation and establish an Abstraction Theorem: while proving a property of a client of a concurrent library, we can soundly replace the library by its abstract implementation related to the original one by our generali-sation of linearizability. We also prove that linearizability with ownership transfer can be derived from the classical one if the library does not access some of data structures transferred to it by the client.