On Monitoring C/C++ Transactional Memory Programs?

Abstract. Transactional memory (TM) is an increasingly popular technique for synchronising threads in multi-threaded programs. To address both correctness and performance-related issues of TM programs, one needs to monitor and ana-lyse their execution. However, monitoring concurrent programs (including TM programs) may have a non-negligible impact on their behaviour, which may ham-per the objectives of the intended analysis. In this paper, we propose several ap-proaches for monitoring TM programs and study their impact on the behaviour of the monitored programs. The considered approaches range from specialised lightweight monitoring to generic heavyweight monitoring. The implemented monitoring tools are publicly available to the scientific community, and the im-plementation techniques used for lightweight monitoring of TM programs may be used as an inspiration for developing other specialised lightweight monitors.